3U 



SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM. 



SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM. 



812 



zum Behuf seiner Vorlesungen ; ' but it was orally by means of the 

 lectures themselves that he first effectively disseminated his new philo- 

 Bophical ideas. Hegel, who had in the meantime been living at Frank- 

 furt-on-the-Main and elsewhere, now joined his friend at Jena (1800), 

 and Schelling's doctrine was advocated in common by himself and 

 Hegel the two acting as joint editors of a journal, and Hegel appear- 

 ing independently, in Schelling's interest, as the author of an essay on 

 the 'Difference of the Systems of Schelling and Fichte.' In 1803 

 Schelling left Jena for Wiirzburg, Hegel succeeding him at Jena, as he 

 had succeeded Fichte ; and in 1807 he removed from Wiirzburg to 

 Munich, where he remained till 1841. 



By the year 1814, when Fichte died at Berlin, the philosophy of 

 Schelling, who had then been seven years settled at Munich, may be 

 considered as having gained the ascendant throughout Germany, as a 

 development beyond that of Fichte and superseding Fichte's system. 

 This had been owing partly to the diffusion of Schelling's views by 

 himself personally in the lecture-room at Jena, at Wiirzburg, and at 

 Munich ; but partly also to various scattered writings some in the 

 form of contributions to journals, some as reports of the substance of 

 his lectures, some as public addresses, and some as distinct essays for 

 the press published by him up to the date in question. Among the 

 more important of these publications were the following : ' On the 

 System of Transcendental Idealism,' 1800 ; a discourse entitled 

 ' Bruno : oder, iiber das gottliche und natiirliche Princip der Dinge,' 

 1802; an essay entitled 'Ideen zu einer Philosophic der Natur, ala 

 Einleituug in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft,' 1803; 'Darlegung 

 des wahren Verhaltnisses der Natur-Philosophie zu der verbesserten 

 Fichtes'chen Lehre,' 1806; a discourse, 'Uber das Verhaltniss der 

 bildenden Kunste zu der Natur,' delivered before the Royal Academy 

 of Sciences in 1807 ; a work entitled ' Von der Weltseele, eine 

 Hypothese der hoheren Physik zur Erkliirung allgemeinen Organis- 

 mus ; nebst einer A"bhaudlung iiber das Verhaltniss des Realen und 

 Idealen in der Natur,' 1809 ; the first volume of a collection of his 

 ' Philosophische Schriften,' published in the same year; and a series 

 of fourteen lectures, 'Uber die Methode des Academischen Studium,' 

 published in 1813. 



Living at Munich on the reputation of these writings, Schelling 

 continued from time to time to develope portions of his doctrines in 

 public addresses or in detached essays ; but on the whole there was in 

 these no important alteration of his philosophy as already given forth 

 in the first fifteen years or so of the present century. Meanwhile, as 

 he had burst away from Fichte, so his old friend and associate Hegel 

 had burst away from him. The germs of a difference between Hegel's 

 philosophical teaching and that of Schelling had manifested themselves 

 in Hegel's lectures at Jena as early as 1806, if not earlier; they had 

 been developed in subsequent works of Hegel; and at length, in 1817 

 when Hegel was appointed to the Philosophy chair at Berlin, which 

 had been vacant since Fichte's death Hegelianism began to appear in 

 the German atmosphere as a system calculated to dispossess Sohelling- 

 istn, as that had dispossessed the system of Fichte. The struggle 

 between Hegelianism and Schellingism increased the former system 

 evidently victorious on the whole till 1831, when Hegel died at 

 Berlin, and Schelling remained alone, in a Germany already filled with 

 the adherents of his opponent, and regarding him as superannuated 

 and left behind in the philosophic march. Schelling was aware of his 

 position ; but he was of opinion that, without altering the essence of 

 his own system as it had preceded Hegel's, but by only bringing out 

 aspects of it not formerly made apparent, and developing some modi- 

 fications the necessity of which he had overlooked, he should be able 

 to present Schellingism in a form which would enable it to stand its 

 ground or recover its ground even in Hegel's Germany, and which 

 would at the samo time bring it into harmony with other modern 

 movements of German thought with which he sympathised, and espe- 

 cially with the religious movement which aimed at a restoration of 

 deep Christian faith as opposed to hard Rationalism. Accordingly, 

 the later portion of Schelling's life first at Munich, and afterwards 

 at Berlin, to which he was transferred in 1841 was spent in the rumi- 

 nation, and partly in the public announcement of thia second or 

 matured edition of his philosophy. In Berlin where he retained his 

 chair but for a few years, but where he afterwards lived habitually 

 the old man was revered as a philosophic patriarch, and his society, 

 like that of Humboldt, was sought after by savans and thinkers. 

 Bunsen, and others of the modern German school of theology, 

 appear to have held him in high esteem. To them the nature of his 

 second or final philosophy may have been made clear by his own con- 

 versations ; but he had not published any connected exposition of it, 

 nor was it known throughout Germany otherwise than vaguely when 

 he died, in August 1854, at the age of seventy-nine. His death took 

 place at Ragaz in Switzerland, whither he had gone for the benefit of 

 his health. 



For the right appreciation of Schelling's philosophy, it is necessary 

 to remember it in its historical relations as a portion of that con- 

 tinuous development of philosophic thought in Germany which Kant 

 began. Kant may be said to have bequeathed two contrary tendencies 

 to the philosophy of his countrymen the tendency to Objective 

 Realism, which supposes a firm external reality in the universe, under- 

 lying all phenomena, and constituting the Not-Me ; and the tendency 

 to Subjective Idealism, which regards the thinking mind as the sole 



reality, and sees all the so-called objects and phenomena of the uni- 

 verse only as modifications or projections of the Me, or as so much 

 various thought of the thinking being. " All subsequent German 

 philosophy has been the prosecution of one or other of these specu- 

 lative directions, or the attempt to reconcile them." Earliest on the 

 realistic side were Jacobi and Herbart ; the latter of whom especially 

 fought against the too great Subjectivism that there was, or that 

 there might be found, in Kant's system as a whole. Fichte, on the 

 other hand, appeared as the thorough-going champion and exponent 

 of the Kantian Idealism. Not content with the notion of the thinking 

 mind and the external universe, the Ego and the Non-Ego, aa being 

 two co-ordinate realities to be both accepted on the evidence of con- 

 sciousness, Fichte allowed independent reality only to the Me, and 

 regarded the universe only as variations of this Me in thought or con- 

 sciousness. Out of this doctrine he developed his powerful philosophy. 

 Towards the end of his career however he was becoming unsteady in 

 his Idealism, from fear that Nihilism might be its logical consequence, 

 and he was straining after a doctrine of so-called ' absolute identity,' 

 which should refer all to one absolute eternal substance, involving 

 both the Me and the Not-Me. What Fichte was striving after Schel- 

 ling accomplished. His system is properly post-Fichtean in historical 

 order, and its main characteristic consists in a kind of universal 

 Objectivism arrived at by first passing through Fichte's universal 

 Idealism. In fact, Schelling was not at first aware that he was doing 

 more than pushing Fichte's doctrine out in a direction in which Fichte 

 meant it to be pushed. 



Fastening, as it were, on the universal Me or ' World-Me,' which 

 Fitche had set forth as the one reality on which philosophy should 

 gaze, Schelling conceived the idea that this absolute eternal subject 

 might be regarded and proceeded from as also the absolute eternal 

 object, out of which all things, both in the mode of the Me and in that 

 of the Not-Me, might be considered as evolving themselves. This 

 doctrine of absolute identity, of a universal and infinite subject-object 

 out of which all things have proceeded by a law of self-movement, is 

 the cardinal doctrine of Schelling. According to Schelling, a know- 

 ledge of the absolute is the only true philosophy, and such knowledge 

 is possible. But it is possible only by a capacity above consciousness 

 and understanding by what he calls ' Intellectual Intuition ;' which is 

 a kind of falling back or swooning of human reason into the absolute 

 as being identical with itself. If man can know the absolute, it can 

 only be because man himself is identical with that absolute ; because 

 knowledge is the same thing as existence, because thinking and being 

 are one. But this is but one aspect of the doctrine of the identity of 

 thought and being, of the subjective and the objective. That absolute, 

 which we come to cognise only through identification with it, and 

 which we name Deity, is to be regarded in its original condition as 

 neither object nor subject, neither nature nor mind, but as the union, 

 the indifference, the slumbering possibility of both. It has become 

 all that exists by a process of self-movement, continually potentiating 

 itself higher and higher, from the lowest manifestations of what is 

 called matter, up to organic existence and the activity of reason 

 itself in the guise of humanity. In this movement of Deity or the 

 Absolute One, which constitutes the Life of the Universe, there are two 

 modes first, the expansive movement, or objectivisiug tendency, by 

 which the absolute rushes forth, so to speak, into actual existence, and 

 out of the natura naturans there comes the whole variety and com- 

 plexity of the natura naturata ; and, secondly, the contractive move- 

 ment, or subjectivising tendency, by which the natura naturata falls 

 back on the natura naturans, and becomes conscious of itself. The 

 study of the absolute as engaged in the first movement tbat is, as 

 coining itself off into the objective is natural philosophy; and only 

 when the philosophy of nature is so considered that is, when nature 

 is considered as so many successive potentiations of the absolute in 

 the form of thought can it be rightly studied. "A perfect intel- 

 lectualising of the laws of nature into laws of intuition and of thinking 

 would be the highest perfecting of the science of nature." Of this 

 style of treating the laws of nature, as modes by which the absolute 

 proceeded in the process of thinking itself gradually out into all that 

 as yet exists, Schelling himself set the example. He interpreted what 

 is called inorganic nature, with its laws of gravity, light, magnetism, 

 and electricity, as being the absolute in what he called its " first 

 potence," or working on in its first efforts for converting the possible 

 into the actual. Even here the subjective and the objective were 

 already differentiated, but objectivity predominated. Then came the 

 second potence, or poteuce of chemism, representing a higher stage 

 in the life, or intellectual activity of the absolute. To this succeeds 

 the third potence, of organically-living nature, where we first see the 

 aspect of consciousness or predominating subjectivity. Though Deity 

 is immanent in all nature, it is in man that Deity becomes most 

 conscious ; and the highest reason of man is identification with Deity 

 a relapsing into the infinite. The ideal in man also corresponds to 

 the real in nature ; and iu the perception of this is the true philosophy 

 of art. 



Such was the doctrine of ' absolute identity,' as it was propounded 

 iu Schelling's first or earlier philosophy. For a fuller view of the 

 immense extension which he gave to it as affecting every possible 

 department of thought, wo must ^efer to his own writings ; or to a 

 very accurate and profound summary of Schelling's system given by 



