636 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



common - sense view ; but in doing so he also intro- 

 duced again that dualism, that twofold way of look- 

 ing at every phenomenon, which had, as it seemed, 

 been overcome by the Kantian and Fichtean intro- 

 spective or transcendental method. 



The highest formal problem of philosophy, the uni- 

 fication of thought and of knowledge, upon which 

 depended, according to the conviction of many of the 

 foremost minds of that age, the solution of the re- 

 ligious problem, the establishment of a reasoned creed, 

 seemed for the moment lost in uncertainty. A second 

 and even more important problem arose accordingly 

 out of the recognition of this dualism. An effort, it 

 was felt, must be made to show that it did not indicate 

 merely a point of indifference confronting the think- 

 ing mind with the unknowable and forcing it into 

 a confession of ignorance. For such more modern 

 conclusions that age, with its undaunted belief in the 

 powers of the human intellect, was not ripe nor pre- 

 pared. The conviction forced itself upon the philo- 

 sophical thought of the age that this point of in- 

 difference, the identity of subject and object, afforded 

 a glimpse into an underlying Unity, into the truly Eeal, 

 a revelation of the Absolute. Accordingly Schelling 

 introduces this idea into his system and conceives of 

 the two sides of existence, of the life of nature and 

 of the life of mind, as the unfolding of the underlying 

 ground which he terms the Absolute, and which he 

 further on identifies with the Divine principle. At 

 this point he approaches the position classically re- 

 presented by Spinoza's system ; but at the same time 



