570 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 982 



Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, was led by mo- 

 tives, which I need not pause here to por- 

 tray, to turn a large share of his attention 

 to an effort to absorb into his absolute sys- 

 tem an organized theory of the nature and 

 meaning of the physical universe. Schel- 

 ling called this portion of his doctrine the 

 ' ' Philosophy of Nature. ' ' That special use 

 of the term NatiirpJiilosophie with which 

 we are here concerned was thus due to 

 Schelling. It meant an interpretation of 

 nature in the light of the principles of an 

 idealistic philosophy. 



Of Schelling 's genuine significance as a 

 philosopher this is not the place to speak. 

 Of the man himself, a very general charac- 

 terization is more possible. In 1800 he was 

 twenty-five years of age. Yet he was al- 

 ready a professor at the University of Jena, 

 to which he had been called in 1798 by 

 Goethe 's recommendation ; and he was also, 

 before the close of the eighteenth century, 

 a celebrated man and a prolific author. He 

 was, in this his decidedly wonderful youth, 

 an intensely restless genius, all aglow with 

 brilliant and often with very genuinely 

 significant ideas — a man of a tropical intel- 

 lectual fecundity, but also of dangerous 

 self-confidence. In polemic he was merci- 

 less, in expression enormously complex, in 

 literary form strangely unequal. The 

 huninous and the hopelessly opaque stand 

 side by side in his books in the strangest 

 contrast. His industry was enormous, his 

 sincerity unquestionable, his real power un- 

 mistakable, his waywardness exasperating, 

 his fr.equent obscurity unpardonable, his 

 contemporary influence vast, but most of his 

 work, despite its frequent value, still far 

 too unstable. He inspired a generation of 

 young men, but did them little good that 

 was at once direct and permanent. Ht 

 wrote down some thoughts that deserve to 

 be remembered for all time, yet so affected 

 his contemporaries that the best of them 



later turned almost wholly away from him. 

 He thus proved, in the long run, to be an 

 irritant rather than an organizing power. 

 His work was often like that of a whirlwind 

 in the world of thought, disturbing, cloud- 

 enshrouded, momentous, but dissatisfying. 

 After 1803 he left Jena, lived long in South 

 Germany, lost his place for many years as 

 a leader of the national thought, passed 

 through various periods of further philo- 

 sophical development, lived to a stately and 

 ineffective old age, came once more in 1841 

 into a brief prominence as a public lecturer 

 in Berlin, but then, retiring yet again from 

 public notice, died in 1854, nearly eighty 

 years old. His published works number 

 fourteen volumes octavo. 



For our present purposes, in order to 

 sketch the youthful Schelling 's Naturphi- 

 losophie as he formulated it in the years 

 about 1800, I shall content myself with the 

 following : Certain reasons which I need not 

 now try to portray, but which, in view of the 

 history of human thought, are, to say the 

 least, strictly intelligible reasons and which 

 are in their true interpretation, as I my- 

 self think, quite defensible reasons, led 

 Schelling to hold, as many philosophers had 

 held before him, that the universe in which 

 we live is in its inmost nature a single or- 

 ganized unity. In other words, Schelling 

 was what you nowadays often hear called a 

 monist. Moreover, Schelling was confident 

 that philosophy, as it was in his time, was 

 prepared to give a new and final interpre- 

 tation of this unity of things. Now an ac- 

 count of the unity of the world would of 

 course undertake to consider the problems 

 of theology, of ethics, and of the philosophy 

 of mind. But this same philosophical ac- 

 count, as Schelling held, would also include 

 a discussion of the nature, the unity and the 

 meaning, of the physical world. Such an 

 account — such a philosophical theory of 

 nature — as Schelling often and expressly 



