458 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



means in and through which the Self or the Absolute 

 arrived at a knowledge of itself and wherein it found a 

 field to display its own activity. In this way of fixing 

 the relation of mind and matter, all reality seemed to be 

 contained in the former ; the latter was degraded to a 

 something which did not possess full reality, having its 

 end and meaning, not in itself, but in something else ; 

 this being the universal consciousness which it, as it 

 were, helped to arrive at self - consciousness. This 

 existed in the form of many individuals and their 

 reunion in human society. Schelling's love of nature 

 and his admiration of tlie philosophy of Spinoza, which 

 centred in the idea of an underlying grotmd or 

 Substance with its two attributes of extension and 

 thought (i.e., of nature and mind), led him to con- 

 sider that Fichte's view of the external world as a 

 Not-self was a degradation of nature which did not do 

 justice to its manifold purposes and beauties, nor to the 

 fact that consciousness itself made its appearance at the 

 23. highest point of the natural order of beings. The first 

 tionof ' step which he accordingly took, was an attempt to show 



Nature. 



how the forms and things of nature exhibit in their way 

 a realisation of the Absolute, analogous to, though 

 essentially different from, the realisation which Fichte's 

 philosophy had tried to demonstrate in the region of 

 mind. In this endeavour of Schelling's we find a 

 resuscitation of that parallelism between the external 

 and internal worlds and their phenomena, which played 

 such a great part in Spinoza's philosophy and which, in 

 more recent times, underlies the doctrine of psycho- 

 physical parallelism. But, whereas Spinoza's system 



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