Part 32

Schelling’s starting point was Fichte, whom he decidedly followed in his earliest writings. In his essay, “_On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy_” he shows the necessity of that supreme principle which Fichte had first propounded. In his essay, “_On the Ego_” Schelling shows that the ultimate ground of our knowledge can only lie in the Ego, and hence that every true philosophy must be idealism. If our knowledge shall possess reality, there must be one point in which ideality and reality, thought and being, can identically coincide; and if outside of our knowledge, there were something higher which conditioned it, if itself were not the highest, then it could not be absolute. Fichte regarded this essay as a commentary on his _Theory of Science_; yet it contains already indications of Schelling’s subsequent standpoint, in its expressly affirming the unity of all knowledge, the necessity that in the end all the different sciences shall become merged into one. In the “_Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism_,” 1795, Schelling combatted the notions of those Kantians who had left the critical and idealistic standpoint of their master, and fallen back again into the old dogmatism. It was also on the standpoint of Fichte that Schelling published in Niethammer’s and Fichte’s Journal, 1797-98, a series of articles, in which he gave a survey of the recent philosophical literature. Here he begins to turn his attention towards a philosophical deduction of nature, though he still remains on the standpoint of Fichte when he deduces nature wholly from the essence of the Ego. In the essay which was composed soon after, and entitled “_Ideas for a philosophy of Nature_,” 1797, and the one “_On the World-soul_,” 1798, he gradually unfolded more clearly his views. The chief points which are brought out in the two last named essays are the following: The first origin of the conception of matter springs from nature and the intuition of the human mind. The mind is the union of an unlimited and a limiting energy. If there were no limit to the mind, consciousness would be just as impossible as if the mind were totally and absolutely limited. Feeling, perception and knowledge are only conceivable, as the energy which strives for the unlimited becomes limited through its opposite, and as this latter becomes itself freed from its limitations. The actual mind or heart consists only in the antagonism of these two energies, and hence only in their ever approximate or relative unity. Just so is it in nature. Matter as such is not the first, for the forces of which it is the unity are before it. Matter is only to be apprehended as the ever becoming product of attraction and repulsion; it is not, therefore, a mere inert grossness, as we are apt to represent it, but these forces are its original. But force in the material is like something immaterial. Force in nature is that which we may compare to mind. Since now the mind or heart exhibits precisely the same conflict, as matter, of opposite forces, we must unite the two in a higher identity. But the organ of the mind for apprehending nature is the intuition which takes, as object of the external sense, the space which has been filled and limited by the attracting and repelling forces. Thus Schelling was led to the conclusion that _the same absolute_ appears in nature as in mind, and that the harmony of these is something more than a thought in reference to them. “Or if you affirm that we only _carry over_ such an idea to nature, then have you utterly failed to apprehend the only nature which there can be to us. For our view of nature is not that it accidentally meets the laws of our mind—(perhaps through the mediation of a third)—but that it necessarily and originally not only expresses, but itself realizes, the laws of our mind, and that it is nature, and is called such only in so far as it does this.” “Nature should be the visible mind, and mind invisible nature. Here, therefore, in the absolute ideality of the mind _within_ us, and nature _without_ us, must we solve the problem how it is possible for a nature outside of us to be.” This thought, that nature or matter is just as much the actual unity of an attracting and a repelling force, as the mind or heart is the unity of an unlimited and a limiting tendency, and that the repelling force in matter corresponds to the positive or unlimited activity of the mind, while the attracting force corresponds to the mind’s negative or limiting activity—this identical deduction of matter from the essence of the Ego, is very prominent in all that Schelling wrote upon natural philosophy during this period. Nature thus appears as a copy (_Doppelbild_) of the mind, which the mind itself produces, in order to return, by its means, to pure self-intuition, to self-consciousness. Hence we have the successive stages of nature, in which all the stations of the mind in its way to self-consciousness are externally established. It is especially in the organic world that the mind can behold its own self-production. Hence, in every thing organic, there is something symbolical, every plant bears some feature of the soul. The chief characteristics of an organic formation,—the self-forming process from within outwards, the conformity to some end, the change of interpenetration of form and matter—are equally chief features of the mind. Since now there exists in our mind an endless striving to organize itself, so there must also be manifested in the external world a universal tendency to organization. The whole universe may thus be called a kind of organization which has formed itself from a centre, rising ever from a lower to a higher stage. From such a point of view, the natural philosopher will make it his chief effort to bring to a unity in his contemplations that life of nature, which by many researches into physical science had been separated into numberless different powers. “It is a needless trouble which many have given themselves, to show how very different is the working of fire and electricity, for every one knows this who has ever seen or heard of the two. But our mind strives after unity in the system of its knowledge; it will not endure that there should be pressed upon it a separate principle for every single phenomenon, and it will only believe that it sees nature where it can discover the greatest simplicity of laws in the greatest multiplicity of phenomena, and the highest frugality of means in the highest prodigality of effects. Therefore, every thought, even that which is now rough and crude, merits attention so soon as it tends towards the simplifying of principles, and if it serves no other end, it at least strengthens the impulse to investigate and trace out the hidden process of nature.” The special tendency of the scientific investigation of nature which prevailed at that time, was to make a duality of forces the predominant element in the life of nature. In mechanics, the Kantian theory of the opposition of attraction and repulsion was adopted; in chemistry, by apprehending electricity as positive and negative, its phenomenon was brought near that of magnetism; in physiology there was the opposition of irritability and sensibility, &c. In opposition to these dualities, Schelling now insisted upon the unity of every thing opposite, the unity of all dualities, and this not simply as an abstract unity, but as a concrete identity, as the harmonious co-working of the heterogeneous. The world is the actual unity of a positive and a negative principle, “and these two conflicting forces taken together, or represented in their conflict, lead to the idea of an organizing principle which makes of the world a system, in other words, to the idea of a world-soul.”

In his above-cited essay on “_the world-soul_,” Schelling took the great step forward of apprehending nature as entirely autonomic. In the world-soul nature has a peculiar principle which dwells within it, and works according to conception. In this way the objective world was recognized as the independent life of nature in a manner which the logical idealism of Fichte would not permit. Schelling proceeded still farther in this direction, and distinguished definitely, as the two sides of philosophy, the philosophy of nature and a transcendental philosophy. By placing a philosophy of nature by the side of idealism, Schelling passed decidedly beyond the standpoint of science, and we thus enter a second stadium of his philosophizing, though his method still remained that of Fichte, and he continued to believe that he was speculating in the spirit of the _Theory of Science_.

II. SECOND PERIOD. STANDPOINT OF THE DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND OF MIND.

This standpoint of Schelling is chiefly carried out in the following works:—“_First Draft of a System of Natural Philosophy_,” 1799; an introduction to this, 1799; articles in the “_Journal of Speculative Physics_,” 1800, 1801; “_System of Transcendental Idealism_,” 1800. Schelling thus distinguishes the two sides of philosophy. All knowledge rests upon the harmony of a subject with an object. That which is simply objective is natural, and that which is simply subjective is the Ego or intelligence. There are two possible ways of uniting these two sides: we may either make nature first, and inquire how it is that intelligence is associated with it (natural philosophy); or we may make the subject first, and inquire how do objects proceed from the subject (transcendental philosophy). The end of all philosophy must be to make either an intelligence out of nature, or a nature out of intelligence. As the transcendental philosophy has to subject the real to the ideal, so must natural philosophy attempt to explain the ideal from the real. Both, however, are only the two poles of one and the same knowledge which reciprocally attract each other; hence, if we start from either pole, we are necessarily drawn towards the other.

1. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.—To philosophize concerning nature is, in a certain sense, to create nature—to raise it from the dead mechanism in which it had seemed confined, to inspire it with freedom, and transpose it into a properly free development. And what, then, is matter, other than mind which has become extinct? According to this view, since nature is only the visible organism of our understanding, it can produce nothing but what is conformable to a rule and an end. But you radically destroy every idea of nature just so soon as you allow its design to have come to it from without, by passing over from the understanding of any being. The complete exhibition of the intellectual world in the laws and forms of the phenomenal world, and, on the other hand, the complete conception of these laws and forms from the intellectual world, and therefore the exhibition of the ideality of nature with the ideal world, is the work of natural philosophy. Immediate experience is indeed its starting point; we know originally nothing except through experience; but just as soon as I gain an insight into the inner necessity of a principle of experience, it becomes a principle apriori. Natural philosophy is empiricism extended until it becomes absolute.

Schelling expresses himself as follows, concerning the chief principles of a philosophy of nature. Nature is a suspension (_Schweben_) between productivity and product, which is always passing over into definite forms and products, just as it is always productively passing beyond these. This suspension indicates a duality of principles, through which nature is held in a constant activity, and hindered from exhausting itself in its products. A universal duality is thus the principle of every explanation of nature; it is the first principle of a philosophic theory of nature, to end in all nature with polarity and dualism. On the other hand, the final cause of all our contemplation of nature is to know that absolute unity which comprehends the whole, and which suffers only one side of itself to be known in nature. Nature is, as it were, the instrument of this absolute unity, through which it eternally executes and actualizes that which is prefigured in the absolute understanding. The whole absolute is therefore cognizable in nature, though phenomenal nature only exhibits in a succession, and produces in an endless development, that which the true or real nature eternally possesses. Schelling treats of natural philosophy in three sections: (1) the proof that nature, in its original products, is _organic_; (2) the conditions of an _inorganic_ nature; (3) the reciprocal determination of organic and inorganic nature.

(1.) _Organic nature_ Schelling thus deduces: Nature absolutely apprehended is nothing other than infinite activity, infinite productivity. If this were unhindered in expressing itself, it would at once, with infinite celerity, produce an absolute product, which would allow no explanation for empirical nature. If this latter may be explained—if there may be finite products, we must consider the productive activity of nature as restrained by an opposite, a retarding activity, which lies in nature itself. Thus arises a series of finite products. But since the absolute productivity of nature tends towards an absolute product, these individual products are only apparent ones, beyond each one of which nature herself advances, in order to satisfy the absoluteness of her inner productivity through an infinite series of individual products. In this eternal producing of finite products, nature shows itself as a living antagonism of two opposite forces, a productive and a retarding tendency. And, indeed, the working of this latter is infinitely manifold; the original productive impulse of nature has not only to combat a simple restraint, but it must struggle with an infinity of reactions, which may be called original qualities. Hence every organic being is the permanent expression for a conflict of reciprocally destroying and limiting actions of nature. And from this, viz., from the original limitation and infinite restraint of the formative impulse of nature, we see the reason why every organization, instead of attaining to an absolute product, only reproduces itself _ad infinitum_. Upon this rests the special significance for the organic world, of the distinction of sex. The distinction of sex fixes the organic products of nature, it restrains them within their own processes of development, and suffers them only to produce the same again. But in this production nature has no regard for the individual, but only for the species. The individual is contrary to nature; nature desires the absolute, and its constant effort is to represent this. Individual products, therefore, in which the activity of nature is brought to a stand, can only be regarded as abortive attempts to represent the absolute. Hence the individual must be the means, and the species the end of nature. Just so soon as the species is secured, nature abandons the individuals and labors for their destruction. Schelling divides the dynamic scale of organic nature according to the three grand functions of the organic world: (_a_) Formative impulse (reproductive energy); (_b_) Irritability; (_c_) Sensibility. Highest in rank are those organisms in which sensibility has the preponderance over irritability; a lower rank is held by those where irritability preponderates, and lower still are those where reproduction first comes out in its entire perfection, while sensibility and irritability are almost extinct. Yet these three powers are interwoven together in all nature, and hence there is but one organization, descending through all nature from man to the plant.

(2.) _Inorganic nature_ offers the antithesis to organic. The existence and essence of inorganic nature are conditioned through the existence and essence of organic nature. While the powers of organic nature are productive, those of inorganic nature are not productive. While organic nature aims only to establish the species, inorganic nature regards only the individual, and offers no reproduction of the species through the individual. It possesses a great multitude of materials, but can only use these materials in the way of conjoining or separating. In a word, inorganic nature is simply a mass held together by some external cause as gravity. Yet it, like organic nature, has its gradations. The power of reproduction in the latter has its counterpart in the chemical process in the former; that which in the one case is irritability, in the other is electricity; and sensibility, which is the highest stage of organic life, corresponds to the universal magnetism, the highest stage of the inorganic.

(3.) _The reciprocal determination of the organic and inorganic world_, is made clear by what has already been said. The result to which every genuine philosophy of nature must come, is that the distinction between organic and inorganic nature is only in nature as object, and that nature, as originally productive, waves over both. If the functions of an organism are only possible on the condition that there is a definite external world, and an organic world, then must the external world and the organic world have a common origin. This can only be explained on the ground that inorganic nature presupposes in order to its existence a higher dynamical order of things, to which it is subject. There must be a third, which can unite again organic and inorganic nature; which can be a medium, holding the continuity between the two. Both must be identified in some ultimate cause, through which, as through one common soul of nature (world-soul), both the organic and inorganic, _i. e._ universal nature, is inspired; in some common principle, which, fluctuating between inorganic and organic nature, and maintaining the continuity of the two, contains the first cause of all changes in the one, and the ultimate ground of all activity in the other. We have here the idea of a universal organism. That it is one and the same organization which unites in one the organic and inorganic world, would appear from what has already been said of the parallel gradations of the two worlds. That which in universal nature is the cause of magnetism, is in organic nature the cause of sensibility, and the latter is only a higher potency of the former. Just as in the organic world through sensibility, so in universal nature through magnetism, there arises a duality from the ideality. In this way organic nature appears only as a higher stage of the inorganic; the very same dualism which is seen in magnetic polarity, electrical phenomena, and chemical differences, displays itself also in the organic world.

2. TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.—Transcendental philosophy is the philosophy of nature become subjective. The whole succession of objects thus far described, becomes now repeated as a successive development of the beholding subject. It is the peculiarity of transcendental idealism, that so soon as it is once admitted, it requires that the origin of all knowledge shall be sought for anew; that the truth which has long been considered as established, should be subjected to a new examination, and that this examination should proceed under at least an entirely new form. All parts of philosophy must be exhibited in one continuity, and the whole of philosophy must be regarded as that which it is, viz., the advancing history of consciousness, which can use only as monuments or documents that which is laid down in experience. (Schelling’s transcendental idealism is, in this respect, the forerunner to Hegel’s _Phœnomenology_, which pursues a similar course). The exhibition of this connection is properly a succession of intuitions through which the Ego raises itself to consciousness in the highest potency. Neither transcendental philosophy nor the philosophy of nature, can alone represent the parallelism between nature and intelligence; but, in order to this, both sciences must be united, the former being considered as a necessary counterpart to the other. The division of transcendental philosophy follows from its problem, to seek anew the origin of all knowledge, and to subject to a new examination every previous judgment which had been held to be established truth. The pre-judgments of the common understanding are principally two: (1) That a world of objects exist independent of, and outside of, ourselves, and are represented to us just as they are. To explain this pre-judgment, is the problem of the first part of the transcendental philosophy (_theoretical philosophy_). (2) That we can produce an effect upon the objective world according to representations which arise freely within us. The solution of this problem is _practical philosophy_. But, with these two problems we find ourselves entangled, (3) in a contradiction. How is it possible that our thought should ever rule over the world of sense, if the representation is conditional in its origin by the objective? The solution of this problem, which is the highest of transcendental philosophy, is the answer to the question: how can the representations be conceived as directing themselves according to the objects, and at the same time the objects be conceived as directing themselves according to the representations? This is only conceivable on the ground that the activity through which the objective world is produced, is originally identical with that which utters itself in the will. To show this identity of conscious and unconscious activity, is the problem of the third part of transcendental philosophy, or the science of ends in nature and of art. The three parts of the transcendental philosophy correspond thus entirely to the three criticks of Kant.

(1.) _The theoretical philosophy_ starts from the highest principle of knowledge, the self-consciousness, and from this point developes the history of self-consciousness, according to its most prominent epochs and stations, viz., sensation, intuition, productive intuition (which produces matter)—outer and inner intuition (from which space and time, and all Kant’s categories may be derived), abstraction (by which the intelligence distinguishes itself from its products)—absolute abstraction, or absolute act of will. With the act of the will there is spread before us,