44 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



become a reality, a living representation, and he con- 

 ceives that this is attained through Art. Art rises 

 at once out of the initial and undefined intuition and, 

 at the same time, supersedes the painful elaboration of 

 detail in the philosophical exposition. In this way he 

 combines the intellectual intuition of Kant with the 

 pesthetical intuition of Schiller. He admits that philo- 

 sophy as philosophy can never become objective and 

 general ; it becomes so only in the sphere of art. " The 

 one thing which possesses absolute objectivity is Art ; 

 take away from art its objectivity and it ceases to be 

 what it is and becomes philosophy ; give this objectivity 

 to philosophy and it ceases to be philosophy and becomes 

 art. — Philosophy, indeed, attains to the highest, but she 

 brings to this height, as it were, only a fraction of the 

 whole man. Art brings the whole man to this height, 

 i.e., to the comprehension of the highest, and on this 

 depends the eternal distinction and the wonder of 

 Art." ' 



From this position Schelling takes a further step 

 forward. He had conceived philosophy as rising out of 

 poetry, as indeed his own philosophy was an attempt to 

 put into systematic form what Schiller and Goethe and 

 the poetic genius of the age conceived intuitively. This 

 poetical intuition he had made the postulate and starting- 

 point of his philosophy. At the end of it he conceived 

 of poetry and art as the consummation of the system, 

 saying finally : " All the single streams flow back 

 again into the ocean of poetry from whence they 



^ The passages quoted in the Transcendental Idealism' (1800) re- 

 text are to be found on the last printed in the ' Collected Works,' 

 pages of Schelling's 'System of sec. i,, pp. 327-634. 



