Thus the fear of death which had long haunted him now excluded everything else and he was in despair. He turned to the working people, whom he had always liked, to study them and found that although they anticipated death they did not worry about it but had a simple faith that bridges the gulf between the finite and the infinite, although they held much he could not accept. Thus for a year while he was considering whether or not to kill himself, he was haunted by a feeling he describes as searching after God, not with his reason but with his feelings. Kant and Schopenhauer said that man could not know Him. Tolstoy at first feared that these experiences presaged his own mental decline. He had joined the church and clung to orthodoxy for three years but in the end left and was later excommunicated. He became a peasant and finally left his pleasant home for a monastery, and as the church had failed he turned to the Gospels, the core of which he found in the Sermon on the Mount. Here was the solution of his problem. If everyone strives for self there is no happiness. Nor is there any love of family and friends alone, but love must extend to all mankind and even to being, and this must be all-embracing. No doubt of immortality can come to any man who renounces his individual happiness. Instead of God he now worships the world-soul and attains the goal of perfection he once sought in self-development. Fechner,[11] born in 1801, made professor of physics in 1833, turned to more psychological studies in 1838. He had visual troubles and could not work without bandaging his eyes, lived in a blue room, had insomnia, and seemed about to die. But in 1843 he improved and felt he was called by God to do extraordinary things, prepared for by suffering. His philosophical inclinations now came into the foreground. He was on the way to the secret of the universe. He believed in insight rather than induction, and this was in the decades when German philosophy was at its lowest ebb. So his works fell dead. Not only Buchner and Moleschott but Kant belonged to what he called the “night side,” for the latter’s _Ding-an-Sich_ was a plot to banish joy. Fechner knew no epistemology and thought we could come into direct contact with reality itself. Man lives three times: once before birth and in sleep; second alternating; and finally in death comes to the eternal awakening. The spirit will then communicate with others without language and all the dead live in us as Christ did in His followers. The earth will return its soul to the sun. Visible phantoms may be degenerate souls. In his _Zendavesta_ (Living Word) he gives us a philosophy that he deems Christian and that really sums up his final view of things. The childish view is nearest right and the philosopher only reverts to it. Fechner died November 18, 1887, at the age of eighty-six, and after his crisis was really more poet than scientist.