174 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



course of his career as a writer and teacher. Thus 

 we have in his earlier period an abstract philosophical 

 or psychological conception of religion, approaching 

 Spinoza on the one side, but assigning to religion on 

 the other a special province in the human soul, con- 

 ceiving it to be neither thought nor practice, but a 

 matter of feeling, of intuition, an elevating tone of the 

 whole mind. And on the other side we have, in his 

 later writings, a definite appreciation for the histori- 

 cal or positive religions and their consummation in 

 Christianity. So also he developed two independent 

 views of ethics a system of philosophical ethics in 

 his earlier phase, and a system of Christian ethics in 

 the later. In some of his earlier writings he coincides 

 largely with Fichte, but he eventually separates himself 

 from him, taking up, what we may term, the programme 

 of Schelling, which we may say in passing the latter 

 never carried out. 1 He did more than any other to 

 realise what Schelling had put forward in one of his 

 earliest essays when he was still under the paramount 

 influence of Fichte. He there conceived the necessity 

 of looking upon the moral law in its relation to the 



1 This is well brought out by 

 Jodl, whose fairness in represent- 

 ing thinkers such as Schleiermacher, 

 from whom he differs in prin- 

 ciple, cannot be sufficiently ap- 

 preciated. In his ' History ' (vol. 



comes to the fore ; and even where 

 he deals with ethical questions he 

 does not attain to real independ- 

 ence. Appearing first as an in- 

 terpreter of Fichte, he later, after 

 developing the system of identity, 



ii. p. 161) he explains the absence ' comes completely under the spell of 

 of an independent appreciation of | Spinoza, reproducing luminously the 



Schelling as an ethical philosopher 

 by the fact "that Schelling always 

 slips away from this [the ethical] 



main ideas of the ' Ethics,' but again 

 without developing an independent 

 theory." In a later chapter Jodl 



problem : it is first the interest in , deals with the influence of Baader 

 the theory of knowledge, then j on Schelling. See specially note 2 

 that in philosophy of nature which i to chap. iii. p. 511 sq. 



