24 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



17. 



Schelling 

 the philos- 

 opher of 

 Romanti- 

 cism. 



philosophical, scientific, and poetical labours for their 

 own sake ; among the latter, the fact that German 

 literature and German philosophy became gradually 

 estranged from the practical interests of life, and moved 

 in a region by themselves : from being imaginative 

 they gradually became fantastic. What in Goethe were 

 only passing phases of his poetical development which 

 mutually supplemented each other and contributed to the 

 depth and width of the whole of his matured thought, 

 were singly taken up and exaggerated by a school 

 of poets and artists which assumed the name of 

 Eomantic. It was a movement which was sometimes 

 opposed to the classical and sometimes to other interests 

 nearer at hand : thus arose Medievalism, a return 

 to Roman Catholicism, a love for the remote and the 

 unreal. In all these endeavours we think we can trace 

 at least one common and prominent feature, namely, 

 the desire better to understand and to cultivate the 

 world of the Beautiful, to appreciate it wherever it could 

 be found, and to elevate it to the rank of a living and 

 active principle. This movement found its philosophical 

 expression in the writings and academic teaching of 

 Schelling, who has been appropriately termed the 

 philosopher of romanticism. As romanticism itself was 

 characterised by no definite and fixed aim, but by a 

 variety of interests, so also did Schelling's speculation 

 pass through a succession of different phases, marking 

 rather a great aspiration than a "lasting and valuable 

 achievement. It is, however, Schelling's undoubted 

 merit to have done more thoroughly what Schiller 

 had attempted before him, namely, to have conceived of 



