OF REALITY. 489 



freedom. In opposition therefore to Hegel, who regarded 

 the necessary forms of thought and the stages of the 

 logical process as representing also the phases of existence, 

 the life of the Logos, Schelling thought it incumbent 

 upon philosophy to recognise in the existing world an 

 element of freedom or, as it has since been frequently 

 termed, the contingent in contradistinction to the 

 necessary. His later philosophy, which existed how- 

 ever only as a postulate or an unfilled programme, was 

 therefore significantly characterised by him as the 

 philosophy of Freedom. In the actual existing world of 

 things and phenomena he recognised something that 

 might also, so far as we could understand, have been 

 otherwise, and which, though following the necessary 

 and eternal laws of all reality, was only one of the many 

 ways in which the Absolute or ultimate ground of 

 everything realised itself. To this idea Schelling in his 36. 



. Hisreligi- 



later philosophy gave a distinctly religious colouring by oustum. 

 conceiving the actual or contingent world as having 

 come into existence by a falling away from the original 

 identity in which it lived in the bosom of the Absolute 

 or Divine Being. This religious turn in his speculation 

 will occupy us on a subsequent occasion. Here it is 

 only necessary to point out how Schelling, though 

 unable to give a satisfactory solution, put his finger upon 

 the difficulty which was inherent in Hegel's scheme, and 

 which became more and more apparent as the manifold 

 examples and applications of this scheme had to submit 

 to rigorous tests and to meet the attacks of criticism. 1 



1 We may thus say that Schel- 

 ling's mind, during the last forty 

 years of his life, wrestled with the 



two great problems which have 

 since been brought out more clearly 

 and on which philosophical thought 



