Misunderstood by contemporaries and epigones the book was often ridiculed. One of the most versatile thinkers of the 19th century, Fechner worked to reconcile an idealistic view of reality with the methodology of modern science and, in so doing, provided some of the groundwork for further developments in a number of areas of experimental psychology. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) after a steep career in science he had overworked and in consequence of experiments on afterimages by gazing in the sun, he sustained an eye injury, and his subsequent, eventually temporary blindness led to a serious emotional crisis. A seemingly miraculous recovery , three years later, stimulated Fechner's interest in philosophy, particularly in regard to the question of the soul and the possibility of refuting materialistic metaphysics. In "Nanna, or the Soul-Life of Plants" (1st. 1844) Fechner defended the idea that even plants have mental life. This book is indicative of the pannpsychistic bent of Fechner's thought, which was the major cause of the direction taken by his further work. The book was probably the first monograph devoted to the psychology of plants. Nanny, by the way, was the Norse goddess of flowers. For Fechner, in the materialistic age of science, to argue for the mental life of plants, even before Darwin had made the mental life of animal a crucial issue, was for him to court scientific unpopularity, but Fechner had to fight the issue. His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lay in his assurance that the entire universe can be regarded as readily from the point of view of its consciousness, a view that later called the "Tagesansicht", as it can be viewed as inert matter, the "Nachtansicht". Yet the demonstration of the consciousness of plants was but a step in a program.