WEIMAR AND JENA. 201 



knowledge, and investigate the sources whence it was ob- 

 tained. 



Fichte, who occupied a professor's chair at Jena from 1794 

 until the controversy concerning his atheistical views compelled 

 his retirement in 1798, much as he was opposed to the intuitive 

 method of contemplating nature, stood in no direct opposi- 

 tion to science; on the contrary, his representation of the 

 process of thought has been found to agree precisely with the 

 conclusions since arrived at by physiology through the study of 

 the brain and the facts of experience. 



It was in 1798 that Schelling became professor at the Uni- 

 versity of Jena. 1 In his ' System of Transcendental Idealism ' 

 he gave an outline of the principles of his new scheme of 

 natural philosophy : ' The necessary tendency of science is to 

 rise from the study of Nature to that of Mind. To this alone 

 is to be ascribed the endeavour to bring theory to bear upon 

 the phenomena of nature. The most complete theory of nature 

 would be that which had power to resolve all nature into one 

 intelligence. The inanimate and unconscious products of 

 nature are only her unsuccessful efforts to reflect herself, 

 but nature, though called inanimate, is in reality an im- 

 mature intelligence, therefore, yet unconscious in her phe- 

 nomena, through which there nevertheless shines a character 

 of intelligence. Nature has only fulfilled her highest aim of 

 reproducing herself in her last and most perfect reflection 

 Man, or in other terms Eeason, in which Nature for the first 

 time reverts to her primeval form, and thus reveals herself to 

 have been originally identical with that which is within us 

 intelligence or consciousness. If the aim of all philosophy 

 must either be to show that an intelligence is derived from 

 nature, or that nature is derived from an intelligence, then 

 transcendental philosophy, which undertakes the latter task, 

 must necessarily assume the first proposition as the ground of 

 its philosophy.' 



., 



1 His ' Ideen zu einer Philosophic der Natur ' was published in 1797. 

 was succeeded in 1798 by t Die Weltseele, eine Hypothese der hohern 

 ysik ; ' in 1799 there followed the ' Erster Entwurf eines Systems der 



Naturphilosophie,' and in 1800 the 'System des transcendentalen Ideal- 



ismus.' 



