SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES xyj 



ling's transcendental philosophy, which resolves itself into a glorification 

 of art, as being the identity of the conscious and the unconscious, and in 

 which subject he certainly felt far more at home than in natural science. 



The influence of his system 

 But even in regard to natural philosophy it would be entirely unhistorical 

 to dismiss Schelling as simply and solely a half-witted fool, as is so often 

 done. This is at once inadmissible, owing to the extraordinary influence he 

 exercised on his own age. And it must be admitted that among all the identi- 

 fications and derivations that constitute his system, there are, besides much 

 madness, a number of really brilliant ideas, which, although expressed as 

 mere fancies, nevertheless undoubtedly exerted an influence upon the future 

 development of science. Thus we may at least suppose that Schelling's com- 

 parison of electricity and magnetism was not without its influence upon 

 Orsted, who along experimental lines discovered electromagnetism and who 

 in his youth was a great admirer of Schelling. It should also be noted that 

 Schelling had a keen eye for the physiological contrast between plants and 

 animals, which lies in the former's oxygen-production and the latter's 

 oxygen-resorption; the significance of this contrast for the general economy 

 of nature he has realized and expressed quite clearly, though, it is true, he 

 draws the odd conclusion that the plant has no life, for its arises merely 

 through the development of the life principle and possesses only the sem- 

 blance of life "im l^ioment dieses negativen Processes." — The whole of the 

 extraordinary thought-system which he built up finds its explanation partly 

 in the vast possibilities which the new gas-chemistry had just then opened 

 up for research and speculation — even in our own time hopes of the solu- 

 tion of the riddle of life have more than once been placed upon important 

 discoveries in the field of natural science — partly in the change from criti- 

 cism to dogmatic philosophy which Fichte had brought about with his 

 theory of the ego as the origin of all things and which was in complete har- 

 mony with the romantic tone that was peculiar to this epoch, particularly in 

 Germany. People dreamt of a uniform conception of existence, they looked 

 for spiritual forces in nature, they had grown accustomed to the mystical 

 dreams that were propagated by a number of secret brotherhoods, and all 

 these vain strivings Schelling met with his explanation of existence as an 

 "absolute identity," an explanation that was no more dogmatic, indeed, but 

 certainly more poetic, than La Mettrie's and his successors' materialism, 

 which had constituted the natural philosophy of the previous genera- 

 tion. What, after all, makes Schelling's natural philosophy useless from the 

 point of view of natural science is its absolute lack of practical value; if the 

 object of natural science is to extend and consolidate man's dominion over 

 nature — and that has indeed been its aim ever since the days of Aristotle 

 and Hippocrates — then certainly most of Schelling's efforts have been in 



