CHARACTER AND WORK OF LIE BIG. 5 i 



have I seen perish in this vertigo, how many wails about life-objects 

 completely missed have I been obliged to hear afterward ! " Thus he 

 spoke in his work on the study of the natural sciences, which was pub- 

 lished at Brunswick in 1840. 



Now, in order that you may be able to apprehend what this kind 

 of philosophy was, and to understand more fully the position from 

 which he had to emancipate himself, even at that early time of his 

 life, I will quote to you a very few passages, and I will make them as 

 short as possible, compatible with illustration, from one of Schelling's 

 works, from the periodical for speculative physics mark the term, 

 " Speculative Physics." I will quote the following passage : " Nature 

 strives in the dynamical sphere necessarily to absolute indifference, 

 not by magnetism nor by electricity is represented the totality of the 

 dynamical pi-ocess, but only by the chemical process. With the third 

 dimension of the product the two other dimensions are opposed. In 

 Nature itself there is one and inseparate, what is separated for the pur- 

 pose of speculation." That is almost enough, but I will give you an- 

 other passage which will be more striking because of the contrary 

 itself being known to you. Here he says of the composition of water : 

 " Water contains just the same as iron, but in absolute indifference as 

 yonder in relative indifference, carbon and nitrogen, and thus all true 

 polarity of the earth is reduced to an original south and north which 

 are fixed in the magnet." Now, in order that you may believe that he 

 did not merely speak of an admixture or impurity of carbon or nitro- 

 gen, but that he meant to say that it was the essence of water, and 

 that it was really composed of these two elements, and not of any 

 other, he goes on to say : " The animal is in organic Nature the iron ; 

 the plant is the water, for Nature begins with the relative separation 

 of the sexes, and then ends in this separation. The animal decomposes 

 the iron, the plant decomposes the water. The female and the male 

 sex of the plant is the carbon and the nitrogen of the water." These 

 are two examples of the philosophy of Schelling, which was believed 

 at that time to be the science by which Germany could be regenerated, 

 by which the generation which had then only just recovered its inde- 

 pendence would be put on a firm mental basis. The followers of this 

 system were called to the court of Prussia, and there Hegel, the phi- 

 losopher, continued in a similar manner to teach doctrines which now- 

 adays seem to be but & farrago of nonsense. Hegel says, for example, 

 on the chemical process : " If electricity was the broken magnetism, 

 because the opposite poles are independent bodies upon which the 

 positive and negative electricity is distributed, and if the point of 

 indifference is the explosion of an indifferent light by itself, then is the 

 chemical process, on the other hand, the totality of the shaping. We 

 have two independent bodies which belong more to the one or the 

 other extreme ; to the metal on the one hand, or the sulphur on the 

 other, which meet in an indifferent medium, and by abandoning their 



