40 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



manhood with the tender charm of early youth, or show- 

 ing a mother with grown-up sons and daughters in the 

 full possession of healthy beauty : what does he else 

 than remove that which is unessential, time ? If, 

 according to the remark of one who well knows, every 

 product of nature has only one moment of truly perfect 

 beauty, we may also say that it has only one moment 

 of full and complete existence. In this moment it is 

 what it is through all eternity : outside of this it is only 

 becoming or vanishing. Art, representing its essence 

 in that very moment, lifts it out of the sequence of 

 time : she lets it appear in its true being, in the eternitj 

 of its own life." ^ 



Had Schelling been content to remain at this point of 

 his speculations, he would have saved himself and his 

 admirers the many disappointments of his later career. 

 When he delivered his address, which ranks in substance 

 as well as in form as one of the finest specimens of 

 writing in the German language, he was already passing 

 into a different stage of his philosophy. His words 

 were rather a reminiscence of bygone days when his 

 orbit coincided for a moment with that of his older and 

 greater contemporary, Goethe. The latter, with the 

 true instinct and genius of the poet and artist, was 

 spared the temptation and the desire of following liis 

 theories into their logical consequences. Schelling lived 

 always on the borderland of poetry and science. The 

 greatest that he has done resembles his own description 

 of works of art ; they are only true to reality for a 

 moment, they are momentary glimpses resembling 



1 Loc. cit., p. 302. 



