c. Practical reason comes next; the point of view from which it starts

is that “The ego posits itself as determining the non-ego.” Now the contradiction has thus to be solved of ego being at home with itself, since it determines its Beyond. The ego is thus infinite activity, and, as ego = ego, the absolute ego, it is undoubtedly abstract. But in order to have a determination, a non-ego must exist; ego is thus activity, causality, the positing of the non-ego. But as with Kant sensuousness and reason remain opposed, the same contradiction is present here, only in a more abstract form, and not in the rude empiricism of Kant. Fichte here turns and twists in all sorts of ways, or he gives the opposition many different forms; the crudest form is that ego is posited as causality, for in it another is necessitated on which it exercises its activity. “The absolute ego has accordingly to be” now “the cause of the non-ego, _i.e._ only of that in the non-ego which remains when we abstract from all demonstrable forms of representation or conception—of that to which is ascribed the check given to the infinitely operative activity of the ego; for the fact that the intelligent ego is, in accordance with the necessary laws of the conception, the cause of the particular determinations of that which is conceived as such, is demonstrated in the theoretic science of knowledge.”[395] The limits of intelligence must be broken through, the ego must alone be active; the other side, the infinite repulsion, must be removed, in order that the ego may be liberated.

“According to our hypothesis the ego must now posit a non-ego absolutely, and without any ground, _i.e._ absolutely and without any ground it must limit or in part not posit itself.” This, indeed, it already does as intelligent. “It must therefore have the ground of not positing itself” only “in itself.” The ego is, however, just the ego, it posits itself, “it must” therefore “have the principle of positing itself within it, and also the principle of not positing itself. Hence the ego in its essence would be contradictory and self-repellent; there would be in it a two-fold or contradictory principle, which assumption contradicts itself, for in that case there would be no principle within it. The ego would” consequently “not exist, for it would abrogate itself. All contradictions are reconciled through the further determination of contradictory propositions. The ego must be posited in one sense as infinite, and in another as finite. Were it to be posited as infinite and finite in one and the same sense, the contradiction would be insoluble; the ego would not be one but two. In so far as the ego posits itself as infinite, its activity is directed upon itself and on nothing else but itself. In so far as the ego posits limits, and itself in these limits, its activity is not exercised directly on itself, but on a non-ego which has to be placed in opposition,” upon another and again upon another, and so on into infinitude; that is the object, and the activity of the ego “is objective activity.”[396] In this way Fichte in the practical sphere also remains at opposition, only this opposition now has the form of two tendencies in the ego, both of which are said to be one and the same activity of the ego. I am called upon to proceed to determine the other in relation to which I am negative, the non-ego, in accordance with my freedom; it has indeed all determinations through the activity of the ego, but beyond my determination the same non-ego ever continues to appear. The ego clearly posits an object, a point of limitation, but where the limitation is, is undetermined. I may transfer the sphere of my determination, and extend it to an infinite degree, but there always remains a pure Beyond, and the non-ego has no positive self-existent determination.

The last point in respect of the practical sphere is hence this, that the activity of the ego is a yearning or striving[397]—like the Kantian “ought”; Fichte treats this with great prolixity. The Fichtian philosophy consequently has the same standpoint as the Kantian; the ultimate is always subjectivity, as existent in and for itself. Yearning, according to Fichte, is divine; in yearning I have not forgotten myself, I have not forgotten that I possess a superiority in myself; and therefore it is a condition of happiness and satisfaction. This infinite yearning and desire has then been regarded as what is highest and most excellent in the Beautiful, and in religious feelings likewise; and with it is connected the irony of which we have spoken before (Vol. I. pp. 400, 401). In this return the ego is merely an effort, on its side it is fixed, and it cannot realize its endeavours. Striving is thus an imperfect or implicitly limited action. The ultimate result is consequently a “circle” which cannot be broken through, so that “the finite spirit must necessarily posit an absolute outside itself (a thing-in-itself), and yet on the other hand it must recognize that this same is only there for it (a necessary noumenon).”[398] To put it otherwise, we see the ego absolutely determined in opposition only, we see it only as consciousness and self-consciousness which does not get beyond this, and which does not reach so far as to Spirit. The ego is the absolute Notion in so far as it does not yet reach the unity of thought, or in this simplicity does not reach difference, and in motion does not have rest; that is to say, in so far as positing, or the pure activity of the ego, and setting in opposition, are not by it comprehended as the same. Or the ego does not comprehend the infinite repulsion, the non-ego; self-consciousness determines the non-ego, but does not know how to make this Beyond its own.

The deficiency in the Fichtian philosophy is thus firstly that the ego retains the significance of the individual, actual self-consciousness, as opposed to that which is universal or absolute, or to the spirit in which it is itself a moment merely; for the individual self-consciousness simply signifies standing apart as far as another is concerned. Hence, if the ego was ever called absolute existence, the most terrible offence was given, because really the ego only came before us as signifying the individual subject as opposed to the universal.

In the second place, Fichte does not attain to the idea of Reason as the perfected, real unity of subject and object, or of ego and non-ego; it is only, as with Kant, represented as the thought of a union in a belief or faith, and with this Fichte likewise concludes (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, p. 301). This he worked out in his popular writings. For because the ego is fixed in its opposition to the non-ego, and _is_ only as being opposed, it becomes lost in that unity. The attainment of this aim is hence sent further and further back into the false, sensuous infinitude: it is a progression implying just the same contradiction as that found in Kant, and having no present actuality in itself; for the ego has all actuality in its opposition only. The Fichtian philosophy recognizes the finite spirit alone, and not the infinite; it does not recognize spirit as universal thought, as the Kantian philosophy does not recognize the not-true; or it is formal. The knowledge of absolute unity is apprehended as faith in a moral disposition of the world, an absolute hypothesis in accordance with which we have the belief that every moral action that we perform will have a good result.[399] As in Kant’s case, this Idea belongs to universal thought. “In a word, when anything is apprehended it ceases to be God; and every conception of God that is set up is necessarily that of a false God. Religion is a practical faith in the moral government of the world; faith in a supersensuous world belongs, according to our philosophy, to the immediate verities.”[400] Fichte thus concludes with the highest Idea, with the union of freedom and nature, but a union of such a nature that, immediately regarded, it is not known; the opposition alone falls within consciousness. This union of faith he likewise finds in the Love of God. As believed and experienced, this form pertains to Religion, and not to Philosophy, and our only possible interest is to know this in Philosophy. But with Fichte it is still associated with a most unsatisfying externality of which the basis is the non-Idea, for the one determination is essential only because the other is so, and so on into infinitude. “The theory of knowledge is realistic—it shows that the consciousness of finite beings can only be explained by presupposing an independent and wholly opposite power, on which, in accordance with their empirical existence, they themselves are dependent. But it asserts nothing more than this opposed power, which by finite beings can merely be _felt_ and not known. All possible determinations of this power or of this non-ego which can come forth into infinity in our consciousness, it pledges itself to deduce from the determining faculties of the ego, and it must actually be able to deduce these, so certainly as it is a theory of knowledge. This knowledge, however, is not transcendent but transcendental. It undoubtedly explains all consciousness from something independent of all consciousness, but it does not forget that this independent somewhat is again a product of its own power of thought, and consequently something dependent on the ego, in so far as it has to be there for the ego. Every thing is, in its ideality, dependent upon the ego; but in its reality even the ego is dependent. The fact that the finite spirit must posit for itself somewhat outside of itself, which last exists only for it, is that circle which it may infinitely extend but never break through.” The further logical determination of the object is that which in subject and object is identical, the true connection is that in which the objective is the possession of the ego; as thought, the ego in itself determines the object. But Fichte’s theory of knowledge regards the struggle of the ego with the object as that of the continuous process of determining the object through the ego as subject of consciousness, without the identity of the restfully self-developing Notion.[401]

Thirdly, because the ego is thus fixed in its one-sidedness, there proceeds from it, as representing one extreme, the whole of the progress that is made in the content of knowledge; and the deduction of the philosophy of Fichte, cognition in its content and form, is a progression from certain determinations to others which do not turn back into unity, or through a succession of finitenesses which do not have the Absolute in them at all. The absolute point of view, like an absolute content, is wanting. Thus the contemplation of nature, for instance, is a contemplation of it as of pure finitenesses from the point of view of another, as though the organic body were regarded thus: “Consciousness requires a sphere entirely its own for its activity. This sphere is posited through an original, necessary activity of the ego, in which it does not know itself as free. It is a sensuous perception, a drawing of lines; the sphere of activity thereby becomes something extended in space. As quiescent, continuous, and yet unceasingly changing, this sphere is matter, which, as body, has a number of parts which in relation to one another are called limbs. The person can ascribe to himself no body without positing it as being under the influence of another person. But it is likewise essential that I should be able to check this same influence, and external matter is also posited as resisting my influences on it, _i.e._ as a tough, compact matter.”[402] These tough matters must further be separated from one another—the different persons cannot hold together like one mass of dough. For “my body is my body and not that of another; it must further operate and be active without my working through it. It is only through the operation of another that I can myself be active and represent myself as a rational being who can be respected by him. But the other being should treat me immediately as a rational being, I should be for him a rational being even before my activity begins. Or my form must produce an effect through its mere existence in space, without my activity, _i.e._ it must be visible. The reciprocal operation of rational beings must take place without activity; thus a subtle matter must be assumed in order that it may be modified by means of the merely quiescent form. In this way are deduced first Light and then Air.”[403] This constitutes a very external manner of passing from one step to another, resembling the method of the ordinary teleology, which makes out, for instance, that plants and animals are given for the nourishment of mankind. This is how it is put: Man must eat, and thus there must be something edible—consequently plants and animals are at once deduced; plants must have their root in something, and consequently the earth is forthwith deduced. What is altogether lacking is any consideration of the object as what it is in itself; it is plainly considered only in relation to another. In this way the animal organism appears as a tough, tenacious matter which is “articulated” and can be modified; light is a subtle matter which is the medium of communication of mere existence, &c.—just as in the other case plants and animals are merely edible. As regards a philosophic consideration of the content there is nothing at all to be found.

Fichte likewise wrote both a Science of Morals and of Natural Rights, but he treats them as sciences pertaining to the understanding only, and his method of procedure is destitute of ideas and carried on by means of a limited understanding. The Fichtian deduction of the conceptions of justice and morality thus remains within the limitations and rigidity of self-consciousness, as against which Fichte’s popular presentations of religion and morality present inconsistencies. The treatise on Natural Rights is a special failure, _e.g._ where he, as we have just seen (p. 502), deduces even nature just as far as he requires it. The organization of the state which is described in Fichte’s Science of Rights is furthermore as unspiritual as was the deduction of natural objects just mentioned, and as were many of the French constitutions which have appeared in modern times—a formal, external uniting and connecting, in which the individuals as such are held to be absolute, or in which Right is the highest principle. Kant began to ground Right upon Freedom, and Fichte likewise makes freedom the principle in the Rights of Nature; but, as was the case with Rousseau, it is freedom in the form of the isolated individual. This is a great commencement, but in order to arrive at the particular, they have to accept certain hypotheses. The universal is not the spirit, the substance of the whole, but an external, negative power of the finite understanding directed against individuals. The state is not apprehended in its essence, but only as representing a condition of justice and law, _i.e._ as an external relation of finite to finite. There are various individuals; the whole constitution of the state is thus in the main characterized by the fact that the freedom of individuals must be limited by means of the freedom of the whole.[404] The individuals always maintain a cold attitude of negativity as regards one another, the confinement becomes closer and the bonds more stringent as time goes on, instead of the state being regarded as representing the realization of freedom.

This philosophy contains nothing speculative, but it demands the presence of the speculative element. As the philosophy of Kant seeks in unity its Idea of the Supreme Good, wherein the opposites have to be united, so the Fichtian philosophy demands union in the ego and in the implicitude of faith; in this self-consciousness in all its actions makes its starting-point conviction, so that in themselves its actions may bring forth the highest end and realize the good. In the Fichtian philosophy nothing can be seen beyond the moment of self-consciousness, of self-conscious Being-within-self, as in the philosophy of England we find expressed—in just as one-sided a way—the moment of Being-for-another, or of consciousness, and that not as a moment simply, but as the principle of the truth; in neither of the two is there the unity of both—or spirit.

Fichte’s philosophy constitutes a significant epoch in Philosophy regarded in its outward form. It is from him and from his methods that abstract thought proceeds, deduction and construction. Hence with the Fichtian philosophy a revolution took place in Germany. The public had penetrated as far as the philosophy of Kant, and until the Kantian philosophy was reached the interest awakened by Philosophy was general; it was accessible, and men were curious to know about it, it pertained to the ordinary knowledge of a man of culture (_supra_, p. 218). Formerly men of business, statesmen, occupied themselves with Philosophy; now, however, with the intricate idealism of the philosophy of Kant, their wings droop helpless to the ground. Hence it is with Kant that we first begin to find a line of separation which parts us from the common modes of consciousness; but the result, that the Absolute cannot be known, has become one generally acknowledged. With Fichte the common consciousness has still further separated itself from Philosophy, and it has utterly departed from the speculative element therein present. For Fichte’s ego is not merely the ego of the empiric consciousness, since general determinations of thought such as do not fall within the ordinary consciousness have likewise to be known and brought to consciousness; in this way since Fichte’s time few men have occupied themselves with speculation. Fichte, it is true, in his later works especially, wrote with a view to meeting the popular ear as we may see in the “Attempt to force the reader into comprehension,” but this end was not accomplished. The public was through the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi strengthened in its opinion—one which it accepted _utiliter_—that the knowledge of God is immediate, and that we know it from the beginning and without requiring to study, and hence that Philosophy is quite superfluous.

2. FICHTE’S SYSTEM IN A RE-CONSTITUTED FORM.

The times called for life, for spirit. Now since mind has thus retreated within self-consciousness, but within self-consciousness as a barren ego, which merely gives itself a content or a realization through finitenesses and individualities which in and for themselves are nothing, the next stage is found in knowing this realization of self-consciousness in itself, in knowing the content in itself as a content which, penetrated throughout by spirit, is self-conscious and spiritual, or a spirit full of content. In his later popular works Fichte thus set forth faith, love, hope, religion, treating them without philosophic interest, and as for a general public: it was a philosophy calculated to suit enlightened Jews and Jewesses, councillors and Kotzebues. He places the matter in a popular form: “It is not the finite ego that is, but the divine Idea is the foundation of all Philosophy; everything that man does of himself is null and void. All existence is living and active in itself, and there is no other life than Being, and no other Being than God; God is thus absolute Being and Life. The divine essence likewise comes forth, revealing and manifesting itself—the world.”[405] This immediate unity of the self-conscious ego and its content, or spirit, which merely has an intuition of its self-conscious life and knows it as the truth immediately, manifested itself subsequently in poetic and prophetic tendencies, in vehement aspirations, in excrescences which grew out of the Fichtian philosophy.

3. THE MORE IMPORTANT OF THE FOLLOWERS OF FICHTE.

On the one hand, in respect of the content which the ego reaches in the philosophy of Fichte, the complete absence of spirituality, the woodenness, and, to put it plainly, the utter foolishness therein evidenced, strike us too forcibly to allow us to remain at his standpoint; our philosophic perception likewise tells us of the one-sidedness and deficiencies of the principle, as also of the evident necessity that the content should prove to be what it is. But on the other hand self-consciousness was therein posited as reality or essence—not as a foreign, alien self-consciousness, but as ego—a signification which all possess, and which finds an answer in the actuality of all. The Fichtian standpoint of subjectivity has thus retained its character of being unphilosophically worked out, and arrived at its completion in forms pertaining to sensation which in part remained within the Fichtian principle, while they were in part the effort—futile though it was—to get beyond the subjectivity of the ego.

a. FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL.

In Fichte’s case the limitation is continually re-appearing; but because the ego feels constrained to break through this barrier, it reacts against it, and gives itself a resting-place within itself; this last ought to be concrete, but it is a negative resting-place alone. This first form, Irony, has Friedrich von Schlegel as its leading exponent. The subject here knows itself to be within itself the Absolute, and all else to it is vain; all the conclusions which it draws for itself respecting the right and good, it likewise knows how to destroy again. It can make a pretence of knowing all things, but it only demonstrates vanity, hypocrisy, and effrontery. Irony knows itself to be the master of every possible content; it is serious about nothing, but plays with all forms. The other side is this, that subjectivity has cast itself into religious subjectivity. The utter despair in respect of thought, of truth, and absolute objectivity, as also the incapacity to give oneself any settled basis or spontaneity of action, induced the noble soul to abandon itself to feeling and to seek in Religion something fixed and steadfast; this steadfast basis, this inward satisfaction, is to be found in religious sentiments and feelings. This instinct impelling us towards something fixed has forced many into positive forms of religion, into Catholicism, superstition and miracle working, in order that they may find something on which they can rest, because to inward subjectivity everything fluctuates and wavers. With the whole force of its mind subjectivity tries to apply itself to what is positively given, to bend its head beneath the positive, to cast itself, so to speak, into the arms of externality, and it finds an inward power impelling it so to do.

b. SCHLEIERMACHER.

On the other hand the ego finds in the subjectivity and individuality of the personal view of things the height of all its vanity—its Religion. All the various individualities have God within themselves. Dialectic is the last thing to arise and to maintain its place. As this is expressed for philosophic self-consciousness, the foreign intellectual world has lost all significance and truth for ordinary culture; it is composed of three elements, a deity pertaining to a time gone by, and individualized in space and existence, a world which is outside the actuality of self-consciousness, and a world which had yet to appear, and in which self-consciousness would first attain to its reality. The spirit of culture has deserted it, and no longer recognizes anything that is foreign to self-consciousness. In accordance with this principle, the spiritual living essence has then transformed itself into self-consciousness, and it thinks to know the unity of spirit immediately from itself, and in this immediacy to be possessed of knowledge in a poetic, or at least a prophetic manner. As regards the poetic manner, it has a knowledge of the life and person of the Absolute immediately, by an intuition, and not in the Notion, and it thinks it would lose the whole as whole, as a self-penetrating unity, were it not to express the same in poetic form; and what it thus expresses poetically is the intuition of the personal life of self-consciousness. But the truth is absolute motion, and since it is a motion of forms and figures [Gestalten], and the universe is a kingdom of spirits, the Notion is the essence of this movement, and likewise of each individual form; it is its ideal form [Form] and not the real one, or that of figure [Gestalt]. In the latter case necessity is lost sight of; individual action, life and heart, remain within themselves, and undeveloped; and this poetry vacillates betwixt the universality of the Notion and the determinateness and indifference of the figure; it is neither flesh nor fish, neither poetry nor philosophy. The prophetic utterance of truths which claim to be philosophical, thus belongs to faith, to self-consciousness, which indeed perceives the absolute spirit in itself, but does not comprehend itself as self-consciousness, since it places absolute reality above Knowledge, beyond self-conscious reason, as was done by Eschenmayer and Jacobi. This uncomprehending, prophetic manner of speech affirms this or that respecting absolute existence as from an oracle, and requires that each man should find the same immediately in his own heart. The knowledge of absolute reality becomes a matter pertaining to the heart; there are a number of would-be inspired speakers, each of whom holds a monologue and really does not understand the others, excepting by a pressure of the hands and betrayal of dumb feeling. What they say is mainly composed of trivialities, if these are taken in the sense in which they are uttered; it is the feeling, the gesture, the fulness of the heart, which first gives them their significance; to nothing of more importance is direct expression given. They outbid one another in conceits of fancy, in ardent poetry. But before the Truth vanity turns pale, spitefully sneering it sneaks back into itself. Ask not after a criterion of the truth, but after the Notion of the truth in and for itself; on that fix your gaze. The glory of Philosophy is departed, for it presupposes a common ground of thoughts and principles—which is what science demands—or at least of opinions. But now particular subjectivity was everything, each individual was proud and disdainful as regards all others. The conception of independent thought—as though there could be a thought which was not such (Vol. I. p. 60)—is very much the same; men have, it is said, to bring forth a particularity of their own, or else they have not thought for themselves. But the bad picture is that in which the artist shows himself; originality is the production of what is in its entirety universal. The folly of independent thought is that it results in each bringing forth something more preposterous than another.

c. NOVALIS.

Subjectivity signifies the lack of a firm and steady basis, but likewise the desire for such, and thus it evermore remains a yearning. These yearnings of a lofty soul are set forth in the writings of Novalis. This subjectivity does not reach substantiality, it dies away within itself, and the standpoint it adopts is one of inward workings and fine distinctions; it signifies an inward life and deals with the minutiæ of the truth. The extravagances of subjectivity constantly pass into madness; if they remain in thought they are whirled round and round in the vortex of reflecting understanding, which is ever negative in reference to itself.

d. FRIES, BOUTERWECK, KRUG.

Yet a last form of subjectivity is the subjectivity of arbitrary will and ignorance. It maintained this, that the highest mode of cognition is an immediate knowledge as a fact of consciousness; and that is so far right. The Fichtian abstraction and its hard understanding has a repellent effect on thought; slothful reason allowed itself to be told the result of the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi, and renounced all consistent thought, all construction. This arbitrariness gave itself entire liberty—the liberty of the _Tabagie_—but in doing so it regarded itself from a poetic or prophetic point of view, as we have just seen (pp. 508, 509). Then it was both more sober and more prosaic, and thus brought the old logic and metaphysic once more into evidence, though with this modification that they are made facts of consciousness. Thus Fries turns back to the faith of Jacobi in the form of immediate judgments derived from reason, and dark conceptions incapable of utterance.[406] He wished to improve the critique of pure reason by apprehending the categories as facts of consciousness; anything one chooses can in such a case be introduced. Bouterweck speaks of “The virtue, the living nature of power; the fact that subject and object are regarded as one, that is as absolute virtue. With this absolute virtue we have all Being and action, namely the eternal, absolute and pure unity; in one word we have grasped the world within us and we have grasped ourselves in the world, and that indeed not through conceptions and conclusions, but directly through the power which itself constitutes our existence and our rational nature. To know the All, or indeed to know God in any way, is, however, impossible for any mortal.”[407] Krug wrote a “Groundwork of Philosophy,” setting forth a “Transcendental Synthesis—that is a transcendental realism and a transcendental idealism inseparably bound together,” It is an “original, transcendental synthesis of the real and the ideal, the thinking subject and the corresponding outer world;” this transcendental synthesis must “be recognized and asserted without any attempt being made at explaining it.”[408]

D. SCHELLING.

It was Schelling, finally, who made the most important, or, from a philosophic point of view, the only important advance upon the philosophy of Fichte; his philosophy rose higher than that of Fichte, though undoubtedly it stood in close connection with it; indeed, he himself professes to be a Fichtian. Now the philosophy of Schelling from the first admitted the possibility of a knowledge of God, although it likewise started from the philosophy of Kant, which denies such knowledge. At the same time Schelling makes Jacobi’s principle of the unity of thought and Being fundamental, although he begins to determine it more closely.[409] To him concrete unity is this, that the finite is no more true than the infinite, the subjective idea no more than objectivity, and that combinations in which both untruths are brought together in their independence in relation to one another, are likewise combinations of untruths merely. Concrete unity can only be comprehended as process and as the living movement in a proposition. This inseparability is in God alone; the finite, on the other hand, is that which has this separability within it. In so far as it is a truth it is likewise this unity, but in a limited sphere, and for that reason in the separability of both moments.

Frederick Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, born on the 27th January, 1775, at Schorndorf,[410] in Wurtemberg, studied in Leipzig and Jena, where he came to be on terms of great intimacy with Fichte. In the year 1807 he became secretary of the Academy of Science in Munich. We cannot with propriety deal fully with his life, for he is still living.[411]

Schelling worked out his philosophy in view of the public. The series of his philosophic writings also represents the history of his philosophic development and the gradual process by which he raised himself above the Fichtian principle and the Kantian content with which he began. It does not thus contain a sequence of separately worked out divisions of Philosophy, but only successive stages in his own development. If we ask for a final work in which we shall find his philosophy represented with complete definiteness none such can be named. Schelling’s first writings are still quite Fichtian, and it is only by slow degrees that he worked himself free of Fichte’s form. The form of the ego has the ambiguity of being capable of signifying either the absolute Ego or God, or ego in my particularity;[412] this supplied the first stimulus to Schelling. His first and quite short work of four sheets which he wrote in 1795 at Tubingen, while still at the university, was called, “On the Possibility of any Form of Philosophy”; it contains propositions respecting the Fichtian philosophy only. The next work, “On the Ego as principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge” (Tubingen, 1795), is likewise quite Fichtian; in this case, however, it is from a wider and more universal point of view, since the ego is therein grasped as an original identity.[413] We find, however, a summary of the Fichtian principle and the Kantian mode of presentation: “It is only by something being originally set in opposition to the ego, and by the ego being itself posited as the manifold (in time), that it is possible for the ego to get beyond the unity which belongs to it of merely being posited, and that, for example, it posits the same content on more than one occasion.”[414] Schelling then passed on to natural philosophy, adopted Kantian forms and reflective determinations, such as those of repulsion and attraction, from Kant’s “Metaphysics of Nature,” and likewise dealt with quite empirical phenomena in expressions taken from Kant. All his first works on this subject come under this category, viz.: “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature,” 1797; “On the World-Soul,” 1798, the second edition of which possesses appendices which are entirely inconsistent with what goes before. In the writings of Herder and Kielmeyer[415] we find sensibility, irritability, and reproduction dealt with, as also their laws, such as that the greater the sensibility the less the irritability, &c.—just as the powers or potencies were dealt with by Eschenmayer. It was only later on in relation to these that Schelling first apprehended nature in the categories of thought, and made general attempts of a more definite character in the direction of greater scientific development. It was only through what had been accomplished by these men that he was enabled to come into public notice so young. The spiritual and intellectual side, morality and the state, he represented on the other hand purely in accordance with Kantian principles: thus in his “Transcendental Idealism,” although it was written from a Fichtian point of view, he goes no further than Kant did in his “Philosophy of Rights” and his work “On Eternal Peace.” Schelling, indeed, later on published a separate treatise on Freedom, deeply speculative in character; this, however, remains isolated and independent, and deals with this one point alone; in Philosophy, however, nothing isolated can be worked out or developed. In the various presentations of his views Schelling on each occasion began again from the beginning, because, as we may see, what went before did not satisfy him; he has ever pressed on to seek a new form, and thus he has tried various forms and terminologies in succession without ever setting forth one complete and consistent whole. His principal works in this connection are the “First Sketch of a System of Natural Philosophy,” 1799; the “System of Transcendental Idealism,” 1800, one of his most carefully thought-out works; “Bruno, a Dialogue on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things,” 1802; “Journal of Speculative Physics,” 1801; “New Journal of Speculative Physics,” 1802 _et_ In the second number of the second volume of his “Journal of Speculative Physics,” Schelling made the commencement of a detailed treatment of the whole of his philosophy. Here he likewise starts to a certain measure, though unconsciously, from the Fichtian form of construction; but the idea is already present that nature equally with knowledge is a system of reason.

It is not feasible here to go into details respecting what is called the philosophy of Schelling, even if time permitted. For it is not yet a scientific whole organized in all its branches, since it rather consists in certain general elements which do not fluctuate with the rest of his opinions. Schelling’s philosophy must still be regarded as in process of evolution, and it has not yet ripened into fruit;[416] we can hence give a general idea of it only.

When Schelling made his first appearance the demands put forward by Philosophy were as follows. With Descartes thought and extension were in some incomprehensible way united in God, with Spinoza it was as motionless substance; and beyond this point of view neither of them ever passed. Later on we saw the form develop, partly in the sciences and partly in the Kantian philosophy. Finally, in the Fichtian philosophy, the form was subjectivity on its own account, from which all determinations were held to develop. What is thus demanded is that this subjectivity of infinite form which we saw dying into irony or arbitrariness (pp. 507-510) should be delivered from its one-sidedness in order to be united with objectivity and substantiality. To put it otherwise, the substance of Spinoza should not be apprehended as the unmoved, but as the intelligent, as a form which possesses activity within itself of necessity, so that it is the forming power of nature, but at the same time knowledge and comprehension. This then is the object of Philosophy; it is not the formal union of Spinoza that is demanded, nor the subjective totality of Fichte, but totality with the infinite form. We see this developing in the philosophy of Schelling.

1. In one of his earlier writings, the “System of Transcendental Idealism,” which we shall consider first of all, Schelling represented transcendental philosophy and natural philosophy as the two sides of scientific knowledge. Respecting the nature of the two, he expressly declared himself in this work, where he once more adopts a Fichtian starting-point: “All knowledge rests on the harmony of an objective with a subjective.” In the common sense of the words this would be allowed; absolute unity, where the Notion and the reality are undistinguished in the perfected Idea, is the Absolute alone, or God; all else contains an element of discord between the objective and subjective. “We may give the name of nature to the entire objective content of our knowledge; the entire subjective content, on the other hand, is called the ego or intelligence.” They are in themselves identical and presupposed as identical. The relation of nature to intelligence is given by Schelling thus: “Now if all knowledge has two poles which mutually presuppose and demand one another, there must be two fundamental sciences, and it must be impossible to start from the one pole without being driven to the other.” Thus nature is impelled to spirit, and spirit to nature; either may be given the first place, and both must come to pass. “If the objective is made the chief,” we have the natural sciences as result, and “the necessary tendency,” the end, “of all natural science thus is to pass from nature to intelligence. This is the meaning of the effort to connect natural phenomena with theory. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect spiritualization of all natural laws into laws of intuitive perception and thought. The phenomenal (the material element) must entirely disappear, and laws (the formal element) alone remain. Hence it comes to pass that the more that which is in conformity with law breaks forth in nature itself, the more the outward covering disappears; the phenomena themselves become more spiritual, and finally cease altogether. The perfect theory of nature would be that by which the whole of nature should be resolved into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of nature are only abortive attempts on the part of nature to reflect itself, but the so-called dead nature is really an immature,” torpid, fossilized “intelligence”; it is implicit only, and thus remains in externality; “hence in its phenomena,” even though “still unconsciously, the character of intelligence shines through. Its highest end, which is to become object to itself, is first attained by nature” (instead of nature we should call it the Idea of nature), “through its highest and ultimate reflection, which is none other than man, or, more generally, it is that which we call reason, through which nature for the first time returns completely within itself, and whereby it becomes evident that nature is originally identical with what is known in us as intelligence or the conscious. Through this tendency to make nature intelligent natural science becomes the philosophy of nature.” The intelligent character of nature is thus spoken of as a postulate of science. The other point of view is “to give the subjective the foremost place.” Thus here “the problem is how to add an objective element agreeing with it. To start from the subjective as from the first and absolute, and to make the objective arise from it,” signifies a new departure; its consideration forms the content of true Transcendental Philosophy, or, as Schelling himself now named this science, “the other science fundamental to Philosophy.” The organ of transcendental philosophy is the subjective, the production of inward action. Production and reflection upon this production, the unconscious and conscious in one, is the æsthetic act of the imagination.[417] Thus these two separate processes are as a whole very clearly expressed: the process which leads from nature to the subject, and that leading from the ego to the object. But the true process could only be traced out by means of logic, for it contains pure thoughts; but the logical point of view was what Schelling never arrived at in his presentation of things.

a. In respect of the ego, as principle of the transcendental philosophy, Schelling sets to work in the same way as did Fichte, inasmuch as he begins from the fact of knowledge “in which the content is conditioned through the form, and the form through the content”; this is formal A = A. But does A exist? The ego is “the point where subject and object are one in their unmediated condition”; the ego is just Ego = Ego, subject-object; and that is the act of self-consciousness wherein I am for myself object to myself. In self-consciousness there is not to be found a distinction between me and anything else; what are distinguished are directly identical, and there is so far nothing at all in opposition to this self-consciousness. How the case stands with regard to external objects is the question which must be decided later, in the further course of development. It is only the Notion of the ego which is to be laid hold of: “The Notion of the ego, that is the act whereby thought in general becomes object to itself, and the ego itself (the object) are absolutely one; independently of this act the ego is nothing.” It is the act whereby thought makes itself objective, and wherein the ego is brought into harmony with the objective, with thought; and from this standpoint it had to be demonstrated how the ego makes its way to objectivity. “The ego, as pure act, as pure action, is not objective in knowledge itself, for the reason that it is the principle of all knowledge. If it is to be object of knowledge, this must come to pass through a very different kind of knowledge than the ordinary.” The immediate consciousness of this identity is intuition, but inwardly it becomes “intellectual intuition”; it “is a knowledge which is the production of its object: sensuous intuition or perception is perception of such a nature that the perception itself appears to be different from what is perceived. Now intellectual intuition is the organ of all transcendental thought,” the act of pure self-consciousness generally. “The ego is nothing else than a process of production which ever makes itself its own object. Science can start from nothing objective,” but from “the non-objective which itself becomes object” as an “original duplicity. Idealism is the mechanism of the origination of the objective world from the inward principle of spiritual activity.”[418]

On the one hand Schelling’s system is related to the philosophy of Fichte, and, on the other hand, he, like Jacobi, makes his principle immediate knowledge—the intelligent intuitive perception which all who wish to philosophize must have. But what comes next is that its content is no longer the indeterminate, the essence of essence, but likewise the Absolute, God, the absolutely self-existent, though expressed as concrete, _i.e._ as mediating itself within itself, as the absolute unity or indifference of subjective and objective. Intellectual intuition is the Fichtian imagination oscillating between two different points. We have already spoken above (p. 417) of the _form_ of intellectual intuition; it is the most convenient manner of asserting knowledge respecting—anything one likes. But the immediate knowledge of God as spiritual is only in the consciousness of Christian nations, and not for others. This immediate knowledge appears to be still more contingent as the intellectual intuition of the concrete, or the identity of subjectivity and objectivity. This intuition is intellectual indeed, because it is a rational intuition, and as knowledge it is likewise absolutely one with the object of knowledge. But this intuition, although itself knowledge, is not as yet known; it is the unmediated, the postulated. As it is in this way an immediate we must possess it, and what may be possessed may likewise not be possessed. Thus since the immediate presupposition in Philosophy is that individuals have the immediate intuition of this identity of subjective and objective, this gave the philosophy of Schelling the appearance of indicating that the presence of this intuition in individuals demanded a special talent, genius, or condition of mind of their own, or as though it were generally speaking an accidental faculty which pertained to the specially favoured few. For the immediate, the intuitively perceived, is in the form of an existent, and is not thus an essential; and whoever does not understand the intellectual intuition must come to the conclusion that he does not possess it. Or else, in order to understand it, men must give themselves the trouble of possessing it; but no one can tell whether he has it or not—not even from understanding it, for we may merely think we understand it. Philosophy, however, is in its own nature capable of being universal; for its ground-work is thought, and it is through thought that man is man. Schelling’s principle is thus indeed clearly a universal; but if a definite intuition, a definite consciousness is demanded, such as the consciousness or intuition of the identity of subjective and objective, this determinate particular thought is not as yet to be found in it.

It was, however, in this form of knowledge of the absolute as concrete, and, further, in the form of unity of subjective and objective, that Philosophy as represented by Schelling more especially marked itself off from the ordinary conceiving consciousness and its mode of reflection. Even less than Fichte did Schelling attain to popularity (_supra_, pp. 504, 505), for the concrete in its nature is directly speculative. The concrete content, God, life, or whatever particular form it has, is indeed the content and object of natural consciousness; but the difficulty lies in bringing what is contained in the concrete into concrete thought in accordance with its different determinations, and in laying hold of the unity. It pertains to the standpoint of the understanding to divide and to distinguish, and to maintain the finite thought-determinations in their opposition; but Philosophy demands that these different thoughts should be brought together. Thought begins by holding apart infinite and finite, cause and effect, positive and negative; since this is the region of reflecting consciousness, the old metaphysical consciousness was able to take part in so doing: but the speculative point of view is to have this opposition before itself and to reconcile it. With Schelling the speculative form has thus again come to the front, and philosophy has again obtained a special character of its own; the principle of Philosophy, rational thought in itself, has obtained the form of thought. In the philosophy of Schelling the content, the truth, has once more become the matter of chief importance, whereas in the Kantian philosophy the point of interest was more especially stated to be the necessity for investigating subjective knowledge. This is the standpoint of Schelling’s philosophy in its general aspects.

b. Since in further analysis the distinction between subject and object comes into view and is accepted, there follows the relationship of the ego to its other; with Fichte that forms the second proposition, in which the self-limitation of the ego is posited. The ego posits itself in opposition to itself, since it posits itself as conditioned by the non-ego; that is the infinite repulsion, for this conditionment is the ego itself. Schelling, on the one hand, says: “The ego is unlimited as the ego only in so far as it is limited,” as it relates to the non-ego. Only thus does consciousness exist, self-consciousness is a barren determination; through its intuition of self the ego becomes finite to itself. “This contradiction only allows itself to be dissolved by the ego becoming in this finitude infinite to itself, _i.e._ by its having an intuitive perception of itself as an infinite Becoming.” The relation of the ego to itself and to the infinite check or force of repulsion is a constant one. On the other hand it is said: “The ego is limited only in so far as it is unlimited;” this limitation is thus necessary in order to be able to get beyond it. The contradiction which we find here remains even if the ego always limits the non-ego. “Both activities—that which makes for infinitude, the limitable, real, objective activity, and the limiting and ideal, mutually presuppose one another. Idealism reflects merely on the one, realism on the other, transcendental idealism on both.”[419] All this is a tangled mass of abstractions.

c. “Neither through the limiting activity nor through the limited does the ego arrive at self-consciousness. There consequently is a third activity, compounded from the other two, through which the ego of self-consciousness arises; this third is that which oscillates between the two—the struggle between opposing tendencies.” There is essential relation only, relative identity; the difference therein present thus ever remains. “This struggle cannot be reconciled by one such action, but only by an infinite succession of such,” _i.e._ the reconciliation of the opposition between the two tendencies of the ego, the inward and the outward, is, in the infinite course of progression, only an apparent one. In order that it may be complete, the whole inward and outward nature must be presented in all its details: but Philosophy can only set forth the epochs which are most important. “If all the intermediate links in sensation could be set forth, that would necessarily lead us to a deduction of all the qualities in nature, which last is impossible.” Now this third activity, which contains the union directly in itself, is a thought in which particularity is already contained. It is the intuitive understanding of Kant, the intelligent intuition or intuitively perceiving intelligence; Schelling, indeed, definitely names this absolute unity of contradictions intellectual intuition. The ego here is not one-sided in regard to what is different; it is identity of the unconscious and the conscious, but not an identity of such a nature that its ground rests on the ego itself.[420]

This ego must be the absolute principle: “All philosophy starts from a principle which as absolute identity is non-objective.” For if it is objective, separation is at once posited and it is confronted by another; but the principle is the reconciliation of the opposition, and therefore in and for itself it is non-objective. “Now how should a principle such as this be called forth to consciousness and understood, as is required if it is the condition attached to the comprehension of all philosophy? That it can no more be comprehended through Notions [Begriffe] than set forth, requires no proof.” Notion to Schelling signifies a category of the ordinary understanding; Notion is, however, the concrete thought which in itself is infinite. “There thus remains nothing more than that it should be set forth in an immediate intuition. If there were such an intuition which had as object the absolutely identical, that which in itself is neither subjective nor objective, and if for such, which,” however, “can be an intellectual intuition only, one could appeal to immediate experience,” the question would be: “How can this intuition be again made objective, _i.e._ how can it be asserted without doubt that it does not rest on a subjective deception, if there is not a universal objectivity in that intuition, which is recognized by all?” This intellectual principle in itself should thus be given in an experience so that men may be able to appeal to it. “The objectivity of intellectual intuition is art. The work of art alone reflects to me what is otherwise reflected through nothing—that absolute identical which has already separated itself in the ego itself.” The objectivity of identity and the knowledge of the same is art; in one and the same intuition the ego is here conscious of itself and unconscious.[421] This intellectual intuition which has become objective is objective sensuous intuition—but the Notion, the comprehended necessity, is a very different objectivity.

Thus a principle is presupposed both for the content of philosophy and for subjective philosophizing: on the one hand it is demanded that the attitude adopted should be one of intellectual intuition, and, on the other hand, this principle has to be authenticated, and this takes place in the work of art. This is the highest form of the objectivization of reason, because in it sensuous conception is united with intellectuality, sensuous existence is merely the expression of spirituality. The highest objectivity which the subject attains, the highest identity of subjective and objective, is that which Schelling terms the power of imagination. Art is thus comprehended as what is inmost and highest, that which produces the intellectual and real in one, and philosophizing is conceived as this genius of art. But art and power of imagination are not supreme. For the Idea, spirit, cannot be truly given expression to in the manner in which art expresses its Idea. This last is always a method pertaining to intuitive perception; and on account of this sensuous form of existence the work of art cannot correspond to the spirit. Thus because the point last arrived at is designated as the faculty of imagination, as art, even in the subject this is a subordinate point of view, and thus in itself this point is not the absolute identity of subjectivity and objectivity. In subjective thought, rational, speculative thought is thus indeed demanded, but if this appears false to you nothing farther can be said than that you do not possess intellectual intuition. The proving of anything, the making it comprehensible, is thus abandoned; a correct apprehension of it is directly demanded, and the Idea is thus assertorically pre-established as principle. The Absolute is the absolute identity of subjective and objective, the absolute indifference of real and ideal, of form and essence, of universal and particular; in this identity of the two there is neither the one nor the other. But the unity is not abstract, empty, and dry; that would signify logical identity, classification according to something common to both, in which the difference remains all the while outside. The identity is concrete: it is subjectivity as well as objectivity; the two are present therein as abrogated and ideal. This identity may easily be shown in the ordinary conception: the conception, we may for example say, is subjective; it has, too, the determinate content of exclusion in reference to other conceptions; nevertheless, the conception is simple—it is one act, one unity.

What is lacking in Schelling’s philosophy is thus the fact that the point of indifference of subjectivity and objectivity, or the Notion of reason, is absolutely presupposed, without any attempt being made at showing that this is the truth. Schelling often uses Spinoza’s form of procedure, and sets up axioms. In philosophy, when we desire to establish a position, we demand proof. But if we begin with intellectual intuition, that constitutes an oracle to which we have to give way, since the existence of intellectual intuition was made our postulate. The true proof that this identity of subjective and objective is the truth, could only be brought about by means of each of the two being investigated in its logical, _i.e._ essential determinations; and in regard to them, it must then be shown that the subjective signifies the transformation of itself into the objective, and that the objective signifies its not remaining such, but making itself subjective. Similarly in the finite, it would have to be shown that it contained a contradiction in itself, and made itself infinite; in this way we should have the unity of finite and infinite. In so doing, this unity of opposites is not asserted beforehand, but in the opposites themselves it is shown that their truth is their unity, but that each taken by itself is one-sided—that their difference veers round, casting itself headlong into this unity—while the understanding all the time thinks that in these differences it possesses something fixed and secure. The result of thinking contemplation would in this former case be that each moment would secretly make itself into its opposite, the identity of both being alone the truth. The understanding certainly calls this transformation sophistry, humbug, juggling, and what-not. As a result, this identity would, according to Jacobi, be one which was no doubt conditioned and of set purpose produced. But we must remark that a one-sided point of view is involved in apprehending the result of development merely as a result; it is a process which is likewise mediation within itself, of such a nature that this mediation is again abrogated and asserted as immediate. Schelling, indeed, had this conception in a general way, but he did not follow it out in a definite logical method, for with him it remained an immediate truth, which can only be verified by means of intellectual intuition. That is the great difficulty in the philosophy of Schelling. And then it was misunderstood and all interest taken from it. It is easy enough to show that subjective and objective are different. Were they not different, nothing could be made of them any more than of A = A; but they are in opposition _as one_. In all that is finite, an identity is present, and this alone is actual; but besides the fact that the finite is this identity, it is also true that it is the absence of harmony between subjectivity and objectivity, Notion and reality; and it is in this that finitude consists. To this principle of Schelling’s, form, or necessity, is thus lacking, it is only asserted. Schelling appears to have this in common with Plato and the Neo-Platonists, that knowledge is to be found in the inward intuition of eternal Ideas wherein knowledge is unmediated in the Absolute. But when Plato speaks of this intuition of the soul, which has freed itself from all knowledge that is finite, empirical, or reflected, and the Neo-Platonists tell of the ecstasy of thought in which knowledge is the immediate knowledge of the Absolute, this definite distinction must be noticed, viz., that with Plato’s knowledge of the universal, or with his intellectuality, wherein all opposition as a reality is abrogated, dialectic is associated, or the recognized necessity for the abrogation of these opposites; Plato does not begin with this, for with him the movement in which they abrogate themselves is present. The Absolute is itself to be looked at as this movement of self-abrogation; this is the only actual knowledge and knowledge of the Absolute. With Schelling this idea has, however, no dialectic present in it whereby those opposites may determine themselves to pass over into their unity, and in so doing to be comprehended.

2. Schelling begins with the idea of the Absolute as identity of the subjective and objective, and accordingly there evinced itself in the presentations of his system which followed, the further necessity of proving this idea; this he attempted to do in the two Journals of Speculative Physics. But if that method be once adopted, the procedure is not immanent development from the speculative Idea, but it follows the mode of external reflection. Schelling’s proofs are adduced in such an exceedingly formal manner that they really invariably presuppose the very thing that was to be proved. The axiom assumes the main point in question, and all the rest follows as a matter of course. Here is an instance: “The innermost essence of the Absolute can only be thought of as identity absolute, altogether pure and undisturbed. For the Absolute is only absolute, and what is thought in it is necessarily and invariably the same, or in other words, is necessarily and invariably absolute. If the idea of the Absolute were a general Notion” (or conception), “this would not prevent a difference being met with in it, notwithstanding this unity of the absolute. For things the most different are yet in the Notion always one and identical, just as a rectangle, a polygon and a circle are all figures. The possibility of the difference of all things in association with perfect unity in the Notion lies in the manner in which the particular in them is combined with the universal. In the Absolute this altogether disappears, because it pertains to the very idea of the Absolute that the particular in it is also the universal, and the universal the particular; and further that by means of this unity form and existence are also one in it. Consequently, in regard to the Absolute, from the fact of its being the Absolute, there likewise follows the absolute exclusion from its existence of all difference, and that at once.”[422]

In the former of the two above-named works, the “Journal of Speculative Physics,” Schelling began by again bringing forward the Substance of Spinoza, simple, absolute Existence, inasmuch as he makes his starting-point the absolute identity of the subjective and objective. Here, like Spinoza, he employed the method of geometry, laying down axioms and proving by means of propositions, then going on to deduce other propositions from these, and so on. But this method has no real application to philosophy. Schelling at this point laid down certain forms of difference, to which he gave the name of potencies, adopting the term from Eschenmayer, who made use of it (p. 514);[423] they are ready-made differences, which Schelling avails himself of. But philosophy must not take any forms from other sciences, as here from mathematics. With Schelling, the leading form is that which was brought into remembrance again by Kant, the form of triplicity as first, second, and third potency.

Schelling, like Fichte, begins with I = I, or with the absolute intuition, expressed as proposition or definition of the Absolute, that “Reason is the absolute indifference of subject and object”: so that it is neither the one nor the other, for both have in it their true determination; and their opposition, like all others, is utterly done away with. The true reality of subject and object is placed in this alone, that the subject is not posited in the determination of subject against object, as in the philosophy of Fichte; it is not determined as in itself existent, but as subject-object, as the identity of the two; in the same way the object is not posited according to its ideal determination as object, but in as far as it is itself absolute, or the identity of the subjective and objective. But the expression “indifference” is ambiguous, for it means indifference in regard to both the one and the other; and thus it appears as if the content of indifference, the only thing which makes it concrete, were indifferent. Schelling’s next requirement is that the subject must not be hampered with reflection; that would be bringing it under the determination of the understanding, which, equally with sensuous perception, implies the separateness of sensuous things. As to the form of its existence, absolute indifference is with Schelling posited as A = A; and this form is for him the knowledge of absolute identity, which, however, is inseparable from the Being or existence of the same.[424]

Thus, therefore, opposition, as form and reality or existence, no doubt appears in this Absolute, but it is determined as a merely relative or unessential opposition: “Between subject and object no other than quantitative difference is possible. For no qualitative difference as regards the two is thinkable,” because absolute identity “is posited as subject and object only as regards the form of its Being, not as regards its existence. There is consequently only a quantitative difference left,” _i.e._ only that of magnitude: and yet difference must really be understood as qualitative, and must thus be shown to be a difference which abrogates itself. This quantitative difference, says Schelling, is the form _actu_: “The quantitative difference of subjective and objective is the basis of all finitude. Each determined potency marks a determined quantitative difference of the subjective and objective. Each individual Being is the result of a quantitative difference of subjectivity and objectivity. The individual expresses absolute identity under a determined form of Being:” so that each side is itself a relative totality, A = B, and at the same time the one factor preponderates in the one, and the other factor in the other, but both remain absolute identity.[425] This is insufficient, for there are other determinations; difference is undoubtedly qualitative, although this is not the absolute determination. Quantitative difference is no true difference, but an entirely external relation; and likewise the preponderance of subjective and objective is not a determination of thought, but a merely sensuous determination.

The Absolute itself, in so far as the positing of difference is taken into account, is defined by Schelling as the quantitative indifference of subjective and objective: in respect to absolute identity no quantitative difference is thinkable. “Quantitative difference is only possible outside of absolute identity, and outside of absolute totality. There is nothing in itself outside of totality, excepting by virtue of an arbitrary separation of the individual from the whole. Absolute identity exists only under the form of the quantitative indifference of subjective and objective.” Quantitative difference, which appears outside of absolute identity and totality, is therefore, according to Schelling, in itself absolute identity, and consequently thinkable only under the form of the quantitative indifference of the subjective and objective. “This opposition does not therefore occur in itself, or from the standpoint of speculation. From this standpoint A exists just as much as B does; for A like B is the whole absolute identity, which only exists under the two forms, but under both of them alike. Absolute identity is the universe itself. The form of its Being can be thought of under the image of a line,” as shown by the following scheme:

+ + A = B A = B ----------------- A = A

“in which the same identity is posited in each direction, but with A or B preponderating in opposite directions.”[426] If we go into details, the main points from an elementary point of view are the following.

The first potency is that the first quantitative difference of the Absolute, or “the first relative totality is matter. Proof: A = B is not anything real either as relative identity or as relative duplicity. As identity A = B, in the individual as in the whole, can be expressed only by the line,”—the first dimension. “But in that line A is posited throughout as existent,” _i.e._ it is at the same time related to B. “Therefore this line presupposes A = B as relative totality throughout; relative totality is therefore the first presupposition, and if relative identity exists, it exists only through relative totality,”—this is duplicity, the second dimension. “In the same way relative duplicity presupposes relative identity. Relative identity and duplicity are contained in relative totality, not indeed _actu_, but yet _potentia_. Therefore the two opposites must mutually extinguish each other in a third” dimension. “Absolute identity as the immediate basis of the reality of A and B in matter, is the force of gravitation. If A preponderates we have the force of attraction, if B preponderates we have that of expansion. The quantitative positing of the forces of attraction and expansion passes into the infinite; their equilibrium exists in the whole, not in the individual.”[427] From matter as the first indifference in immediacy Schelling now passes on to further determinations.

The second potency (A²) is light, this identity itself posited as existent; in so far as A = B, A² is also posited. The same identity, “posited under the form of relative identity,” _i.e._ of the polarity which we find appearing “in A and B, is the force of cohesion. Cohesion is the impression made on matter by the self-hood” of light “or by personality, whereby matter first emerges as particular out of the universal identity, and raises itself into the realm of form.” Planets, metals and other bodies form a series which under the form of dynamic cohesion expresses particular relations of cohesion, in which on the one hand contraction preponderates, and on the other hand expansion. These potencies appear with Schelling as north and south, east and west polarity: their developments further appear as north-west, south-east, &c. He counts as the last potency Mercury, Venus, the Earth, &c. He continues: “Cohesion outside of the point of indifference I term passive. Towards the negative side” (or pole) “fall some of the metals which stand next to iron, after them the so-called precious metals,” then the “diamond, and lastly carbon, the greatest passive cohesion. Towards the positive side, again, some metals fall, in which the cohesive nature of iron gradually diminishes,” _i.e._ approaches disintegration, and lastly “disappears in nitrogen.” Active cohesion is magnetism, and the material universe is an infinite magnet. The magnetic process is difference in indifference, and indifference in difference, and therefore absolute identity as such. The indifference point of the magnet is the “neither nor” and the “as well as”; the poles are potentially the same essence, only posited under two factors which are opposed. Both poles depend “only upon whether + or - preponderates”; they are not pure abstractions. “In the total magnet the empirical magnet is the indifference point. The empirical magnet is iron. All bodies are mere metamorphoses of iron—they are potentially contained in iron. Every two different bodies which touch each other set up mutually in each other relative diminution and increase of cohesion. This mutual alteration of cohesion by means of the contact of two different bodies is electricity; the cohesion-diminishing factor +E is the potency of hydrogen,-E is the potency of oxygen. The totality of the dynamic process is represented only by the chemical process.”[428]

“By the positing of the dynamic totality the addition of light is directly posited as a product. The expression, the total product, therefore signifies light combined with the force of gravitation; by the positing of the relative totality of the whole potency, the force of gravity is directly reduced to the mere form of the Being of absolute identity.” Thus is the third potency (A³), the organism.[429] Schelling launched out into too many individual details, if he desired to indicate the construction of the whole universe. On the one hand, however, he did not complete this representation, and on the other hand, he has confined himself mainly to implicit existence, and has mixed therewith the formalism of external construction according to a presupposed scheme. In this representation he advanced only as far as the organism, and did not reach the presentation of the other side of knowledge, _i.e._ the philosophy of spirit. Schelling began time after time, in accordance with the idea implied in this construction, to work out the natural universe, and especially the organism. He banishes all such meaningless terms as perfection, wisdom, outward adaptability; or, in other words, the Kantian formula, that a thing appears so and so to our faculty of knowledge, is transformed by him into this other formula, that such and such is the constitution of Nature. Following up Kant’s meagre attempt at demonstrating spirit in nature, he devoted special attention to inaugurating anew this mode of regarding nature, so as to recognize in objective existence the same schematism, the same rhythm, as is present in the ideal. Hence nature represents itself therein not as something alien to spirit, but as being in its general aspect a projection of spirit into an objective mode.

We have further to remark that Schelling by this theory became the originator of modern Natural Philosophy, since he was the first to exhibit Nature as the sensuous perception or the expression of the Notion and its determinations. Natural Philosophy is no new science; we met with it continually—in the works of Aristotle, for instance, and elsewhere. English Philosophy is also a mere apprehension in thought of the physical; forces, laws of Nature, are its fundamental determinations. The opposition of physics and Natural Philosophy is therefore not the opposition of the unthinking and the thinking view of Nature; Natural Philosophy means, if we take it in its whole extent, nothing else than the thoughtful contemplation of Nature; but this is the work of ordinary physics also, since its determinations of forces, laws, &c., are thoughts. The only difference is that in physics thoughts are formal thoughts of the understanding, whose material and content cannot, as regards their details, be determined by thought itself, but must be taken from experience. But concrete thought contains its determination and its content in itself, and merely the external mode of appearance pertains to the senses. If, then, Philosophy passes beyond the form of the understanding, and has apprehended the speculative Notion, it must alter the determinations of thought, the categories of the understanding regarding Nature. Kant was the first to set about this; and Schelling has sought to grasp the Notion of Nature, instead of contenting himself with the ordinary metaphysics of the same. Nature is to him nothing but the external mode of existence as regards the system of thought-forms, just as mind is the existence of the same system in the form of consciousness. That for which we have to thank Schelling, therefore, is not that he brought thought to bear on the comprehension of Nature, but that he altered the categories according to which thought applied itself to Nature; he introduced forms of Reason, and applied them—as he did the form of the syllogism in magnetism, for instance—in place of the ordinary categories of the understanding. He has not only shown these forms in Nature, but has also sought to evolve Nature out of a principle of this kind.

In the “Further Exposition of the System of Philosophy” which the “New Journal for Speculative Physics” furnishes, Schelling chose other forms; for, by reason of incompletely developed form and lack of dialectic, he had recourse to various forms one after another, because he found none of them sufficient. Instead of the equilibrium of subjectivity and objectivity, he now speaks of the identity of existence and form, of universal and particular, of finite and infinite, of positive and negative, and he defines absolute indifference sometimes in one and sometimes in another form of opposition, just according to chance. All such oppositions may be employed; but they are only abstract, and refer to different stages in the development of the logical principle itself. Form and essence are distinguished by Schelling in this way, that form, regarded on its own account, is the particular, or the emerging of difference, subjectivity. But real existence is absolute form or absolute knowledge immediately in itself, a self-conscious existence in the sense of thinking knowledge, just as with Spinoza it had the form of something objective or in thought. Speculative Philosophy is to be found in this assertion, not that it asserts an independent philosophy, for it is purely organization; knowledge is based on the Absolute. Thus Schelling has again given to transcendental Idealism the significance of absolute Idealism. This unity of existence and form is thus, according to Schelling, the Absolute; or if we regard reality as the universal, and form as the particular, the Absolute is the absolute unity of universal and particular, or of Being and knowledge. The different aspects, subject and object, or universal and particular, are only ideal oppositions; they are in the Absolute entirely and altogether one. This unity as form is intellectual intuition, which posits Thinking and Being as absolutely alike, and as it formally expresses the Absolute, it becomes at the same time the expression of its essence. He who has not the power of imagination, whereby he may represent this unity to himself, is deficient in the organ of Philosophy. But in this consists the true absoluteness of all and each, that the one is not recognized as universal, and the other as particular, but the universal in this its determination is recognized as unity of the universal and particular, and in like manner the particular is recognized as the unity of both. Construction merely consists in leading back everything determined and particular into the Absolute, or regarding it as it is in absolute unity; its determinateness is only its ideal moment, but its truth is really its Being in the Absolute. These three moments or potencies—that of the passing of existence (the infinite) into form (the finite), and of form into existence (which are both relative unities), and the third, the absolute unity, thus recur anew in each individual. Hence Nature, the real or actual aspect, as the passing of existence into form or of the universal into the particular, itself again possesses these three unities in itself, and in the same way the ideal aspect does so; therefore each potency is on its own account once more absolute. This is the general idea of the scientific construction of the universe—to repeat in each individual alike the triplicity which is the scheme of the whole, thereby to show the identity of all things, and in doing so to regard them in their absolute essence, so that they all express the same unity.[430]

The more detailed explanation is extremely formal: “Existence passes into form—this taken by itself being the particular (the finite)—by means of the infinite being added to it; unity is received into multiplicity, indifference into difference.” The other assertion is: “Form passes into existence by the finite being received into the infinite, difference into indifference.” But passing into and receiving into are merely sensuous expressions. “Otherwise expressed, the particular becomes absolute form by the universal becoming one with it, and the universal becomes absolute existence by the particular becoming one with it. But these two unities, as in the Absolute, are not outside of one another, but in one another, and therefore the Absolute is absolute indifference of form and existence,” as unity of this double passing-into-one. “By means of these two unities two different potencies are determined, but in themselves they are both the exactly equal roots of the Absolute.”[431] That is a mere assertion, the continual return after each differentiation, which is perpetually again removed out of the Absolute.

“Of the first absolute transformation there are copies in phenomenal Nature; therefore Nature, regarded in itself, is nothing else than that first transformation as it exists in the absolute (unseparated from the other). For by means of the infinite passing into the finite, existence passes into form; since then form obtains reality only by means of existence, existence, when it has passed into form without form having (according to the assumption) similarly passed into existence, can be represented only as potentiality or ground of reality, but not as indifference of possibility and actuality. But that which may be described thus, namely as existence, in so far as that is mere ground of reality, and therefore has really passed into form, although form has not in turn passed into it, is what presents itself as Nature.—Existence makes its appearance in form, but in return form also makes its appearance in existence; this is the other unity,” that of mind. “This unity is established by the finite being received into the infinite. At this point form, as the particular, strikes into existence, and itself becomes absolute. Form which passes into existence places itself as absolute activity and positive cause of reality in opposition to the existence which passes into form, and which appears only as ground. The passing of absolute form into existence is what we think of as God, and the images or copies of this transformation are in the ideal world, which is therefore in its implicitude the other unity.”[432] Each of these two transformations, then, is the whole totality, not, however, posited and not appearing as totality, but with the one or the other factor preponderating; each of the two spheres has, therefore, in itself again these differences, and thus in each of them the three potencies are to be found.

The ground or basis, Nature as basis merely, is matter, gravity, as the first potency; this passing of form into existence is in the actual world universal mechanism, necessity. But the second potency is “the light which shineth in darkness, form which has passed into existence. The absolute unification of the two unities in actuality, so that matter is altogether form, and form is altogether matter, is organism, the highest expression of Nature as it is in God, and of God as He is in Nature, in the finite.” On the ideal side “Knowledge is the essence of the Absolute brought into the daylight of form; action is a transformation of form, as the particular, into the essence of the Absolute. As in the real world form that is identified with essence appears as light, so in the ideal world God Himself appears in particular manifestation as the living form which has emerged in the passing of form into essence, so that in every respect the ideal and real world are again related as likeness and symbol. The absolute unification of the two unities in the ideal, so that material is wholly form and form wholly material, is the work of art; and that secret hidden in the Absolute which is the root of all reality comes here into view, in the reflected world itself, in the highest potency and highest union of God and Nature as the power of imagination.” On account of that permeation art and poetry therefore hold the highest rank in Schelling’s estimation. But art is the Absolute in sensuous form alone. Where and what could the work of art be, which should correspond to the Idea of the spirit? “The universe is formed in the Absolute as the most perfect organic existence and the most perfect work of art: for Reason, which recognizes the Absolute in it, it possesses absolute truth; for the imagination, which represents the Absolute in it, it possesses absolute Beauty. Each of these expresses the very same unity,” regarded “from different sides; and both arrive at the absolute indifference point in the recognition of which lies both the beginning and the aim of real knowledge.”[433] This highest Idea, these differences, are grasped as a whole in a very formal manner only.

3. The relation of Nature to Spirit, and to God, the Absolute, has been stated by Schelling elsewhere, _i.e._ in his later expositions, as follows: he defines the existence of God as Nature—in so far as God constitutes Himself its ground or basis, as infinite perception—and Nature is thus the negative moment in God, since intelligence and thought exist only by means of the opposition of one Being. For in one of his writings, directed on some particular occasion against Jacobi, Schelling explains himself further with regard to the nature of God and His relation to Nature. He says: “God, or more properly the existence which is God, is ground: He is ground of Himself as a moral Being. But” then “it is ground that He makes Himself”—not cause. Something must precede intelligence, and that something is Being—“since thought is the exact opposite of Being. That which is the beginning of an intelligence cannot be in its turn intelligent, since there would otherwise be no distinction; but it cannot be absolutely unintelligent, for the very reason that it is the potentiality of an intelligence. It will accordingly be something between these, _i.e._ it will operate with wisdom, but as it were with an innate, instinctive, blind, and yet unconscious wisdom; just as we often hear those who are under a spell uttering words full of understanding, but not uttering them with comprehension of their meaning, but as it were owing to an inspiration.” God, therefore, as this ground of Himself, is Nature—Nature as it is in God; this is the view taken of Nature in Natural Philosophy.[434] But the work of the Absolute is to abrogate this ground, and to constitute itself Intelligence. On this account Schelling’s philosophy has later been termed a Philosophy of Nature, and that in the sense of a universal philosophy, while at first Natural Philosophy was held to be only a part of the whole.

It is not incumbent on us here to give a more detailed account of Schelling’s philosophy, or to show points in the expositions hitherto given by him which are far from satisfactory. The system is the latest form of Philosophy which we had to consider, and it is a form both interesting and true. In the first place special emphasis, in dealing with Schelling, must be laid on the idea that he has grasped the true as the concrete, as the unity of subjective and objective. The main point in Schelling’s philosophy thus is that its interest centres round that deep, speculative content, which, as content, is the content with which Philosophy in the entire course of its history has had to do. The Thought which is free and independent, not abstract, but in itself concrete, comprehends itself in itself as an intellectually actual world; and this is the truth of Nature, Nature in itself. The second great merit possessed by Schelling is to have pointed out in Nature the forms of Spirit; thus electricity, magnetism, &c., are for him only external modes of the Idea. His defect is that this Idea in general, its distinction into the ideal and the natural world, and also the totality of these determinations, are not shown forth and developed as necessitated in themselves by the Notion. As Schelling has not risen to this point of view, he has misconceived the nature of thought; the work of art thus becomes for him the supreme and only mode in which the Idea exists for spirit. But the supreme mode of the Idea is really its own element; thought, the Idea apprehended, is therefore higher than the work of art. The Idea is the truth, and all that is true is the Idea; the systematizing of the Idea into the world must be proved to be a necessary unveiling and revelation. With Schelling, on the other hand, form is really an external scheme, and his method is the artificial application of this scheme to external objects. This externally applied scheme takes the place of dialectic progress; and this is the special reason why the philosophy of Nature has brought itself into discredit, that it has proceeded on an altogether external plan, has made its foundation a ready-made scheme, and fitted into it Nature as we perceive it. These forms were potencies with Schelling, but instead of mathematical forms or a type of thought like this, by some other men sensuous forms have been taken as basis, just as were sulphur and mercury by Jacob Boehme. For instance, magnetism, electricity, and chemistry have been defined to be the three potencies in Nature, and thus in the organism reproduction has been termed chemistry; irritability, electricity; and sensibility, magnetism.[435] In this way there has crept into Natural Philosophy the great formalism of representing everything as a series, which is a superficial determination without necessity, since instead of Notions we find formulas. Brilliant powers of imagination are displayed, such as were exhibited by Görres. This mistake of applying forms which are taken from one sphere of Nature to another sphere of the same has been carried a long way; Oken, for example, calls wood-fibres the nerves and brain of the plant, and is almost crazy on the subject. Philosophy would in this way become a play of mere analogical reflections; and it is not with these but with thoughts that we have to do. Nerves are not thoughts, any more than such expressions as pole of contraction, of expansion, masculine, feminine, &c. The formal plan of applying an external scheme to the sphere of Nature which one wishes to observe, is the external work of Natural Philosophy, and this scheme is itself derived from the imagination. That is a most false mode of proceeding; Schelling took advantage of it to some extent, others have made a complete misuse of it. All this is done to escape thought; nevertheless, thought is the ultimate simple determination which has to be dealt with.

It is therefore of the greatest importance to distinguish Schelling’s philosophy, on the one hand, from that imitation of it which throws itself into an unspiritual farrago of words regarding the Absolute; and, on the other hand, from the philosophy of those imitators, who, owing to a failure to understand intellectual intuition, give up comprehension, and with it the leading moment of knowledge, and speak from so-called intuition, _i.e._ they take a glance at the thing in question, and having fastened on it some superficial analogy or definition, they fancy they have expressed its whole nature, while in point of fact they put an end to all capacity for attaining to scientific knowledge. This whole tendency places itself, in the first place, in opposition to reflective thought, or to progress in fixed, steadfast, immovable Notions. But instead of remaining in the Notion and recognizing it as the unresting ego, they have lighted on the opposite extreme of passive intuition, of immediate Being, of fixed implicitude; and they think that they can make up for the lack of fixity by superficial observation, and can render this observation intellectual by determining it once more by some fixed Notion or other; or they bring their minds to bear on the object of consideration by saying, for instance, that the ostrich is the fish among birds, because he has a long neck—fish becomes a general term, but not a Notion. This whole mode of reasoning, which has forced its way into natural history and natural science, as well as into medicine, is a miserable formalism, an irrational medley of the crudest empiricism with the most superficial ideal determinations that formalism ever descended to. The philosophy of Locke is not so crude as it is, for it is not a whit better in either its content or its form, and it is combined with foolish self-conceit into the bargain. Philosophy on this account sank into general and well-deserved contempt, such as is for the most part extended to those who assert that they have a monopoly of philosophy. Instead of earnestness of apprehension and circumspection of thought, we find in them a juggling with idle fancies, which pass for deep conceptions, lofty surmises, and even for poetry; and they think they are right in the centre of things when they are only on the surface. Five-and-twenty years ago[436] the case was the same with poetic art; a taste for ingenious conceits took possession of it, and the effusions of its poetic inspiration came forth blindly from itself, shot out as from a pistol. The results were either crazy ravings, or, if they were not ravings, they were prose so dull that it was unworthy of the name of prose. It is just the same in the later philosophies. What is not utterly senseless drivel about the indifference-point and polarity, about oxygen, the holy, the infinite, &c., is made up of thoughts so trivial that we might well doubt our having correctly apprehended their meaning, in the first place because they are given forth with such arrogant effrontery, and in the second place because we cannot help trusting that what was said was not so trivial as it seems. As in the Philosophy of Nature men forgot the Notion and proceeded in a dead unspiritual course, so here they lose sight of spirit entirely. They have strayed from the right road; for by their principle, Notion and perception are one unity, but in point of fact this unity, this spirit, itself emerges in immediacy, and is therefore in intuitive perception, and not in the Notion.

E. FINAL RESULT.

The present standpoint of philosophy is that the Idea is known in its necessity; the sides of its diremption, Nature and Spirit, are each of them recognized as representing the totality of the Idea, and not only as being in themselves identical, but as producing this one identity from themselves; and in this way the identity is recognized as necessary. Nature, and the world or history of spirit, are the two realities; what exists as actual Nature is an image of divine Reason; the forms of self-conscious Reason are also the forms of Nature. The ultimate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with reality. It is easy from subordinate standpoints to find satisfaction in modes of intuitive perception and of feeling. But the deeper the spirit goes within itself, the more vehement is the opposition, the more abundant is the wealth without; the depth is to be measured by the greatness of the craving with which spirit seeks to find itself in what lies outside of itself. We saw the thought which apprehends itself appearing; it strove to make itself concrete within itself. Its first activity is formal; Aristotle was the first to say that νοῦς is the thought of thought. The result is the thought which is at home with itself, and at the same time embraces the universe therein, and transforms it into an intelligent world. In apprehension the spiritual and the natural universe are interpenetrated as one harmonious universe, which withdraws into itself, and in its various aspects develops the Absolute into a totality, in order, by the very process of so doing, to become conscious of itself in its unity, in Thought. Philosophy is thus the true theodicy, as contrasted with art and religion and the feelings which these call up—a reconciliation of spirit, namely of the spirit which has apprehended itself in its freedom and in the riches of its reality.

To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage has its own form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are preserved, since Philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms. This concrete idea is the result of the strivings of spirit during almost twenty-five centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to know itself:

_Tantæ molis erat, se ipsam cognoscere mentem._

All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal. What we pass in rapid review when we recall it, stretched itself out in reality to this great length of time. For in this lengthened period, the Notion of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to make progress itself and to develop from spirit. It goes ever on and on, because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the ground so fast?”[437]), until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away, and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted. This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself. Its result is the Notion which it takes up of itself; the history of Philosophy is a revelation of what has been the aim of spirit throughout its history; it is therefore the world’s history in its innermost signification. This work of the human spirit in the recesses of thought is parallel with all the stages of reality; and therefore no philosophy oversteps its own time. The importance which the determinations of thought possessed is another matter, which does not belong to the history of Philosophy. These Notions are the simplest revelation of the World spirit: in their more concrete form they are history.

We must, therefore, in the first place not esteem lightly what spirit has won, namely its gains up to the present day. Ancient Philosophy is to be reverenced as necessary, and as a link in this sacred chain, but all the same nothing more than a link. The present is the highest stage reached. In the second place, all the various philosophies are no mere fashionable theories of the time, or anything of a similar nature; they are neither chance products nor the blaze of a fire of straw, nor casual eruptions here and there, but a spiritual, reasonable, forward advance; they are of necessity one Philosophy in its development, the revelation of God, as He knows Himself to be. Where several philosophies appear at the same time, they are different sides which make up one totality forming their basis; and on account of their one-sidedness we see the refutation of the one by the other. In the third place we do not find here feeble little efforts to establish or to criticize this or that particular point; instead of that, each philosophy sets up a new principle of its own, and this must be recognized.

If we glance at the main epochs in the whole history of Philosophy, and grasp the necessary succession of stages in the leading moments, each of which expresses a determinate Idea, we find that after the Oriental whirl of subjectivity, which attains to no intelligibility and therefore to no subsistence, the light of thought dawned among the Greeks.

1. The philosophy of the ancients had the absolute Idea as its thought; and the realization or reality of the same consisted in comprehending the existing present world, and regarding it as it is in its absolute nature. This philosophy did not make its starting-point the Idea itself, but proceeded from the objective as from something given, and transformed the same into the Idea; the Being of Parmenides.

2. Abstract thought, νοῦς, became known to itself as universal essence or existence, not as subjective thought; the Universal of Plato.

3. In Aristotle the Notion emerges, free and unconstrained, as comprehending thought, permeating and spiritualizing all the forms which the universe contains.

4. The Notion as subject, its independence, its inwardness, abstract separation, is represented by the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: here we have not the free, concrete form, but universality abstract and in itself formal.

5. The thought of totality, the intelligible world, is the concrete Idea as we have seen it with the Neo-Platonists. This principle is ideality generally speaking, which is present in all reality, but not the Idea which knows itself: this is not reached until the principle of subjectivity, individuality, found a place in it, and God as spirit became actual to Himself in self-consciousness.

6. But it has been the work of modern times to grasp this Idea as spirit, as the Idea that knows itself. In order to proceed from the conscious Idea to the self-conscious, we must have the infinite opposition, namely the fact that the Idea has come to the consciousness of being absolutely sundered in twain. As spirit had the thought of objective existence, Philosophy thus perfected the intellectuality of the world, and produced this spiritual world as an object existing beyond present reality, like Nature,—the first creation of spirit. The work of the spirit now consisted in bringing this Beyond back to reality, and guiding it into self-consciousness. This is accomplished by self-consciousness thinking itself, and recognizing absolute existence to be the self-consciousness that thinks itself. With Descartes pure thought directed itself on that separation which we spoke of above. Self-consciousness, in the first place, thinks of itself as consciousness; therein is contained all objective reality, and the positive, intuitive reference of its reality to the other side. With Spinoza Thought and Being are opposed and yet identical; he has the intuitive perception of substance, but the knowledge of substance in his case is external. We have here the principle of reconciliation taking its rise from thought as such, in order to abrogate the subjectivity of thought: this is the case in Leibnitz’s monad, which possesses the power of representation.

7. In the second place, self-consciousness thinks of itself as being self-consciousness; in being self-conscious it is independent, but still in this independence it has a negative relation to what is outside self-consciousness. This is infinite subjectivity, which appears at one time as the critique of thought in the case of Kant, and at another time, in the case of Fichte, as the tendency or impulse towards the concrete. Absolute, pure, infinite form is expressed as self-consciousness, the Ego.

8. This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical;—substance is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive,—or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, _i.e._ it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge, and not as self-knowledge: or it knows nothing, and what it perceives it does not really know,—for, taken at its best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.

But intellectual intuition is knowledge, since, in the first place, in spite of the separation of each of the opposed sides from the other, all external reality is known as internal. If it is known according to its essence, as it is, it shows itself as not existing of itself, but as essentially consisting in the movement of transition. This Heraclitean or Sceptical principle, that nothing is at rest, must be demonstrated of each individual thing; and thus in this consciousness—that the essence of each thing lies in determination, in what is the opposite of itself—there appears the apprehended unity with its opposite. Similarly this unity is, in the second place, to be recognized even in its essence; its essence as this identity is, in the same way, to pass over into its opposite, or to realize itself, to become for itself something different; and thus the opposition in it is brought about by itself. Again, it may be said of the opposition, in the third place, that it is not in the Absolute; this Absolute is existence, the eternal, &c. This is, however, itself an abstraction in which the Absolute is apprehended in a one-sided manner only, and the opposition is apprehended only as ideal (_supra_, p. 536); but in fact it is form, as the essential moment of the movement of the Absolute. This Absolute is not at rest, and that opposition is not the unresting Notion; for the Idea, unresting though it is, is yet at rest and satisfied in itself. Pure thought has advanced to the opposition of the subjective and objective; the true reconciliation of the opposition is the perception that this opposition, when pushed to its absolute extreme, resolves itself; as Schelling says, the opposites are in themselves identical—and not only in themselves, but eternal life consists in the very process of continually producing the opposition and continually reconciling it. To know opposition in unity, and unity in opposition—this is absolute knowledge; and science is the knowledge of this unity in its whole development by means of itself.

This is then the demand of all time and of Philosophy. A new epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective existence, and apprehending itself at last as absolute Spirit, in developing from itself what for it is objective, and keeping it within its own power, yet remaining at rest all the while. The strife of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which last seemed to the other to lie outside of itself, now comes to an end. Finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and in this way absolute self-consciousness has, on the other hand, attained to the reality which it lacked before. This is the whole history of the world in general up to the present time, and the history of Philosophy in particular, the sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now, indeed, it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit accordingly is realized as spirit. For it becomes such only as the result of its knowing itself to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real scientific knowledge. Spirit produces itself as Nature, as the State; nature is its unconscious work, in the course of which it appears to itself something different, and not spirit; but in the State, in the deeds and life of History, as also of Art, it brings itself to pass with consciousness; it knows very various modes of its reality, yet they are only modes. In scientific knowledge alone it knows itself as absolute spirit; and this knowledge, or spirit, is its only true existence. This then is the standpoint of the present day, and the series of spiritual forms is with it for the present concluded.

At this point I bring this history of Philosophy to a close. It has been my desire that you should learn from it that the history of Philosophy is not a blind collection of fanciful ideas, nor a fortuitous progression. I have rather sought to show the necessary development of the successive philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes another preceding it. The general result of the history of Philosophy is this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of the one principle; in the second place, that the succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science; in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that preceded it. We can now, for example, be Platonists no longer. Moreover we must raise ourselves once for all above the pettinesses of individual opinions, thoughts, objections, and difficulties; and also above our own vanity, as if our individual thoughts were of any particular value. For to apprehend the inward substantial spirit is the standpoint of the individual; as parts of the whole, individuals are like blind men, who are driven forward by the indwelling spirit of the whole. Our standpoint now is accordingly the knowledge of this Idea as spirit, as absolute Spirit, which in this way opposes to itself another spirit, the finite, the principle of which is to know absolute spirit, in order that absolute spirit may become existent for it. I have tried to develop and bring before your thoughts this series of successive spiritual forms pertaining to Philosophy in its progress, and to indicate the connection between them. This series is the true kingdom of spirits, the only kingdom of spirits that there is—it is a series which is not a multiplicity, nor does it even remain a series, if we understand thereby that one of its members merely follows on another; but in the very process of coming to the knowledge of itself it is transformed into the moments of the one Spirit, or the one self-present Spirit. This long procession of spirits is formed by the individual pulses which beat in its life; they are the organism of our substance, an absolutely necessary progression, which expresses nothing less than the nature of spirit itself, and which lives in us all. We have to give ear to its urgency—when the mole that is within forces its way on—and we have to make it a reality. It is my desire that this history of Philosophy should contain for you a summons to grasp the spirit of the time, which is present in us by nature, and—each in his own place—consciously to bring it from its natural condition, _i.e._ from its lifeless seclusion, into the light of day.

I have to express my thanks to you for the attention with which you have listened to me while I have been making this attempt; it is in great measure due to you that my efforts have met with so great a measure of success. And it has been a source of pleasure to myself to have been associated with you in this spiritual community; I ought not to speak of it as if it were a thing of the past, for I hope that a spiritual bond has been knit between us which will prove permanent. I bid you a most hearty farewell.

* * * * *

(The closing lecture of the series was given on the 22nd March, 1817; on the 14th March, 1818; on the 12th August, 1819; on the 23rd March, 1821; on the 30th March, 1824; on the 28th March, 1828; and on the 26th March, 1830.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Neander. Genet. Entwickelung d. vornehmsten gnost. Systeme, p. 43.

[2] Neander. Genetische Entwickelung, &c., pp. 87-91.

[3] Tennemann, Vol. VIII Section I. p. 366; Buhle: Lehrb. d. Gesch. d. Phil. Part V. p. 36; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 23, 24; 28, 29.

[4] Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 71, pp. 133, 134 (Basil. 1629).

[5] Abulphar. Dynast. IX. pp. 153, 171, 208, 209; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 27-29, 44.

[6] Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 73, pp. 152-155, 157-159.

[7] Pocock. Specim. hist. Arab. pp. 78, 79; Hottinger. Biblioth. orient. c. 2, p. 219; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 65, 66; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 374.

[8] Hottinger. Biblioth. orient. c. 2, p. 221; Gabriel Sionita: De moribus Orient. p. 16; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 73, 74; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 374, 375.

[9] Leo Africanus: De illustrib. Arabum viris, c. 9, p. 268; Abulphar. Dynast. IX. p. 230, Tiedemann, Geist. d. spec. Phil. Vol. IV. p. 112, _sqq._, Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 80-84.

[10] Leo Afric. De illustrib. Arabum viris, c. 12, p. 274; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 93-95; Tiedemann, Geist. d. spec. Phil. Vol. IV. pp. 120-126, Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 383-396.

[11] Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. p. 97.

[12] Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. p. 101; Tennemann, Vol. III. Section I. pp. 420, 421.

[13] Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. II. p. 857; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 446, 447.

[14] Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 51, pp. 76-78; c. 57, 58, pp. 93-98; II. c. 1, 2, pp. 184-193; III. c. 8, pp. 344-350; &c., &c.

[15] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Pt. I. p. 49.

[16] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 614-617; Bulæus: Hist. Universitatis Parisiensis; T. I. p. 184.

[17] Bulæus: Hist. Univ. Paris. T. I. p. 182. (Tennemann, Vol. VIII. pp. 71, 72.)

[18] De prædestinatione. Proœmium (Veterum auctorum, qui IX. sæculo de prædestinatione et gratia scripserunt, opera et fragmenta, cura Gilb. Mauguin. Paris, 1650. T. I. p. 103.)

[19] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. I. pp. 115, 117.

[20] Anselmi Epistol. XLI. I. 11 (Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. I. pp. 159, 160.)

[21] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. I. p. 116; Eadmerus: De vita Anselmi (subjuncta operibus Anselmi editis a Gabr. Gerberon. 1721. Fol.), p. 6.

[22] Gaunilo: Liber pro insipiente, c. 5; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. I. p. 139; Brucker, Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 665.

[23] Tiedemann: Geist d. specul. Philos. Vol. IV. p. 277; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 762.

[24] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. II. pp. 457, 458.

[25] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 764-768.

[26] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. I. pp. 317, 325; Brucker, Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 688; Thomas Aquinas: in IV. libros sentent. L. II. Dist. 17, Qu. I. Art. I; Alberti Magni: Summa Theol. P. I. Tract. IV. Qu. 20 (Oper. T. XVII. p. 76).

[27] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. II. pp. 550-553; Brucker, Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 802.

[28] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. II. pp. 554-561.

[29] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 825-828; Bulæus: Hist. Univ. Paris. T. IV. p. 970.

[30] Duns Scotus in Magistrum sententiarum. Proœmium (Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. II. p. 706).

[31] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 828; et not. from Sancrutius.

[32] Trithemius: Annal. Hirsaugiens, T. I. p. 135.

[33] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 779, 697; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Sec. I. pp. 353-359, and in the same place, note 3 (cf. Jourdain, Gesch. d. Arist. Schriften im Mittelalter, ubersetzt von Stahr pp. 165-176); Bulæus: Hist. Univers. Paris, T. III. pp. 82, 142; Launoius, De varia Arist. fortuna in Academ. Paris, c. IX. p. 210.

[34] Hegel erroneously mentions this event as occurring to “William of England” instead of to William of Holland, King of the Romans. [Translator’s note.]

[35] Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 788-798.

[36] Anselmus: De fide trinitatis, c. 2, 3; Epist. XLI. 1. 11; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 158.

[37] Rixner: Handbuch der Geschichte der Philos., Vol. II. p. 26 (1st ed.); Anselmus De fide trinitatis, c. 2; Buhle: Lehrbuch d. Geschichte d. Philosoph., Part V. p. 184; Abælard, Epist. XXI.; Tennemann, Vol. VIII Section I. pp. 162, 163.

[38] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 339; Joh. Sarisberiensis: Metalogicus, L. II. c. 17.

[39] Tiedemann: Geist d. specul. Philos. Vol. V. pp. 401, 402; Suarez. Disputationes metaphysicæ, Disp. I Sectio 6.

[40] Tiedemann; Geist d. specul. Philos. Vol. IV. pp. 490, 491; Thomas Aquinas: De ente et essent. c 3 et 5.

[41] Tiedemann: Geist d. spec. Philos. Vol. IV. pp. 609-613; Scotus: in Magistrum sententiar. L. II. Dist., 3. Qu. 1-6; Occam: in libr. I. sentent. Dist. II. Quæst. 6 (Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 852, 853.)

[42] Rixner: Handbuch der Geschichte der Philos. Vol. II. p. 110.

[43] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 846-848, 911, 912; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 903, 944, 945, 925, 939, 940; Bulæus: Hist. Univers. Paris, T. IV. pp. 257, 265.

[44] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 914-919, 945-947; Bulæus: Hist. Univ. Paris. T.V. pp. 706, 739, 740.

[45] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 61; Cramer, Fortsetzung von Bossuet, Part V. Vol. II. p. 88.

[46] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 61; Bulæus: Hist. Univ. Paris. T. I. p. 169.

[47] Rixner: Handbuch d. Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. II. p. 153.

[48] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I, pp. 236, 237.

[49] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 878.

[50] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 955, 956.

[51] Rixner: Handbuch d. Geschichte d. Philos. Vol. II. p. 157; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. p. 964 _seq._; Tiedemann: Geist d. spec. Phil. Vol. V. p. 290 _seq._

[52] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 824-829.

[53] Rixner: Lehrbuch d. Gesch. d. Philos. Vol. II. p. 126; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 829, 833.

[54] Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section II. pp. 834-836; Rixner: Handb. d. Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. II. Appendix, pp. 86-89; Jordanus Brunus Nolanus: De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lullii, Sectio II. (Bruni scripta, quæ latine confecit, omnia; ed. Gfrörer, Stuttgardiæ 1835, Fasciculus II. pp. 243-264).

[55] Buhle: Lehrb. d. Gesch. d. Phil., Part VI. Section I. pp. 125—128; Tennemann, Vol. IX. pp. 22, 23.

[56] Pomponatius: Tractatus de immortalitate animæ, c. VII., VIII. p. 35; c. IX. pp. 57, 58; c. XII. pp. 89, 90; c. XV. p. 142.

[57] Ficinus: Proœmium in Plotinum, p. 2, Pomponatius, l. l. c. III. p. 9; c. IV. 12; Tennemann, Vol. IX. pp. 65-67.

[58] Bruck. Hist. crit. phil. T. IV. P. I. p. 164.

[59] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. IV. P. I. pp. 44, 45.

[60] Ficinus: Proœmium in Plotinum, p. 1; Brucker. I. 1, p. 49, 55, 48.

[61] Proclus: Theologia Platonis, Appendix, pp. 503-505; Tennemann, Vol. IX. p. 149.

[62] Tennemann, Vol. IX. pp. 164, 165; Tiedemann: Geist d. Spec. Phil. Vol. V. p. 483; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. IV. P. I. pp. 358, 365, 366; Rixner: Handbuch d. Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. II. p. 206.

[63] Tennemann, Vol. IX. pp. 228-230; Brucker. 1. 1, p. 721.

[64] Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. IV. P. II. pp. 63, 64, 66-68; Buhle: Lehrb. d. Gesch. d. Phil. Part VI. Section I. pp. 360, 362; Cardanus: De vita propria, c. 4, pp. 9-11; Tiedemann, Geist d. spec. Philosophie, Vol. V. pp. 563, 564.

[65] Buhle: Lehrb. d. Gesch. d. Phil. Part VI. Section I. pp. 362-365; Tiedemann, Geist. d. Spec. Phil. Vol. V. p. 565; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. IV. P. II. pp. 71-74; Cardanus: De vita propria, c. 26, p. 70.

[66] Cardanus: De genitur. XII. p. 84; Buhle: Lehrbuch d. Gesch. d. Phil.