In the construction of the real series Schelling proceeds still more schematically and analogically than in the Naturphilosophie of the first period, the contents of which are here essentially reproduced. With this is closely connected his endeavor, in correspondence with the principles of the theory of identity, to show in every phenomenon the operation of all three moments of the absolute. In each natural product all three "potencies" or stages, gravity A(^1), light A(^2), and organization A(^3), are present, only in subordination to one of their number. Since the third potency is never lacking, all is organic; that which appears to us as inorganic matter is only the residuum left over from organization, that which could become neither plant nor animal. New here is the cohesion-series of Steffens (the phenomenon of magnetism), in which nitrogen forms the south pole, carbon the north pole, and iron the point of indifference, while oxygen, hydrogen, and water represent the east pole, west pole, and indifference point in electrical polarity. In the organic world plants represent the carbon pole, animals the nitrogen pole; the former is the north pole, the latter the south. Moreover, the points of indifference reappear: the plant corresponds to water, the animal to iron. Schelling was far outdone in fantastic analogies of this kind by his pupils, especially by Oken, who in his Sketch of the Philosophy of Nature, 1805, compares the sense of hearing, for example, to the parabola, to a metal, to a bone, to the bird, to the mouse, and to the horse. As nature was the imaging of the infinite (unity or essence) into the finite (plurality or form), so spirit is the taking up of the finite into the infinite. In the spiritual realm also all three divine original potencies are every, where active, though in such a way that one is dominant. In intuition (sensation, consciousness, intuition, each in turn thrice divided) the infinite and the eternal are subordinated to the finite; in thought or understanding (concept, judgment, inference, each in three kinds) the finite and the eternal are subordinated to the infinite; in reason (which comprehends all under the form of the absolute) the finite and the infinite are subordinated to the eternal. Intuition is finite cognition, thought infinite cognition, reason eternal cognition. The forms of the understanding do not suffice for the knowledge of reason; common logic with its law of contradiction has no binding authority for speculation, which starts with the equalization of opposites. In the Aphorisms by way of Introduction science, religion, and art figure as stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real all—matter, motion, and organization. Nature culminates in man, history in the state. Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the return of the absolute to itself.
Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia, i.e., his Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, is the presupposition of all particular knowledge. The function of universities is to maintain intact the connection between particular knowledge and absolute knowledge. The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in the absolute: Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite; History and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula. There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty, which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable. The two lectures on theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important. There are two forms of religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of providence begins. In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism. The speculative kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the Indian sages; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in time, but as eternal. It has been a hindrance to the development of Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents.
If, finally, we compare Schelling's system of identity with its model, the system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent. Although both thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal manifestations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit thought in dependence on extension (the soul represents what the body is), while in Schelling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spirit is still potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute identity than the organism, although, principiantly considered, the greatest possible approximation to the equilibrium of the real and the ideal is as much attained in the one as in the other). The second difference lies in the fact that the idea of development is entirely lacking in Spinoza, while in Schelling it is everywhere dominant. It reminds one of Lessing and Herder, who also attempted to combine Spinozistic and Leibnitzian elements.
%3a. Doctrine of Freedom.%
The system of identity had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the real world of absolute identity and the imagined world of differentiated and changeable individual things; it had traced back the latter to the former as its ground, but had not deduced it from the former. Whence, then, the imagination which, instead of the unchangeable unity, shows us the changing manifold? Whence the imperfections of the finite, whence evil? The pantheism of Spinoza is inseparably connected with determinism, which denies evil without explaining it. Evil and finitude demand explanation, not denial, and this without the abandonment of pantheism. But explanation by what? By the absolute, for besides the absolute there is naught. How, then, must the pantheistic doctrine of the absolute be transformed in order that the fact of evil and the separate existence of the finite may become comprehensible? To this task are devoted the Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (Philosophical Works, vol. i., 1809, with which should be compared the Memorial of Jacobi, 1812, and the Answer to Eschenmayer, 1813).
As early as in the Bruno, the problem occasionally emerges why matters do not rest with the original infinite unity of the absolute, why the finite breaks away from the identical primal ground. The possibility of the separation, it is answered, lies in the fact that the finite is like the infinite realiter, and yet, ideally, is different from it; the actuality of the coming forth, however, lies in the non-deducible self-will of the finite. Then after Eschenmayer[1] (Philosophy in its Transition to Not-philosophy, 1803) had characterized the procession of the Ideas out of the Godhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy must yield to faith, Schelling, in the essay Religion and Philosophy, 1804, goes more deeply into the problem. The origin of the sense-world is conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a falling away, which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary. The counterpart of this attainment of independence on the part of things or creation is history as the return of the world to its source. They are related to each other as the fall to redemption. Both the dismission of the world and its reception back, together with the intervening development, are, however, events needed by God himself in order to become actual God: He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the Middle Ages: if God is to give a complete revelation of himself he must make known his grace; and this presupposes sin. As the occasion of divine grace, the fall is a happy, saving fault; without it God could not have revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.) Schelling's study of Jacob Böhme, to which he was led by Baader, essentially contributed to the concentration of his thought on this point. The Exposition of the True Relation, etc., already distinctly betrays the influence of this mystic. In correspondence with Böhme's doctrine that God is living God only through his inclusion of negation in himself, it is here maintained: A being can manifest itself only when it is not merely one, but has another, an opposition (the many), in itself, whereby it is revealed to itself as unity. With the addition of certain Kantian ideas, in particular the idea of transcendental freedom and the intelligible character, Schelling's theosophy now assumes the following form:
The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless God of Spinoza is to assume something in God which is not God himself, to distinguish between God as existent and that which is merely the ground of his existence or "nature in God." In God also the perfect proceeds from the imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself. The actual, perfect God, who is intelligence, wisdom, goodness, is preceded by something which is merely the possibility of all this, an obscure, unconscious impulse toward self-representation. For in the last analysis there is no being but willing; to willing alone belong the predicates of the primal being, groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. This "ground of existence" is an obscure "longing" to give birth to self, an unconscious impulse to become conscious; the goal of this longing is the "understanding," the Logos, the Word, wherein God becomes revealed to self. By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its matter and instrument, God becomes actual God, becomes spirit and love. The operation of the light understanding on the dark nature-will consists in a separation of forces, whence the visible world proceeds. Whatever in the latter is perfect, rational, harmonious, and purposive is the work of the understanding; the irrational remainder, on the other hand, conflict and lawlessness, abortion, sickness and death, originates in the dark ground. Each thing has two principles in it: its self-will it receives from nature in God, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding, it is the instrument of the universal will. In God the light and dark principles stand in indissoluble unity, in man they are separable. The freedom of man's will makes him independent of both principles; going over from truth to falsehood, he may strive to make his selfhood supreme and to reduce the spiritual in him to the level of a means, or—with divine assistance—continuing in the center, he may endeavor to subordinate the particular will to the will of love. Good consists in overcoming resistance, for in every case a thing can be revealed only through its opposite. If man yields to temptation it is his own guilty choice. Evil is not merely defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood breaking away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the universal will. The possibility of a separation of the two wills lies in the divine ground (it is "permitted" in order that by overmastering the self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is the free act of the creature. Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion: Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates himself in the first creation, i.e., from eternity, and is responsible for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that free primal act.
[Footnote 1: K. Ad. Eschenmayer was originally a physician, then, 1811-36, professor of philosophy in Tübingen, and died in 1852 at Kirchheim unter Teck.]
As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the two original grounds of things do battle with one another. The golden age of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the omnipotence of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the spiritual light was born in personal form. The subsequent conflict of good against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything subordinated to spirit, and thus the complete identity of the ground of existence and the existing God be brought about.
Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Schelling recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms indifference or groundlessness; the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega) is called identity or spirit. In the former the contraries are not yet present; in the latter they are present no longer. The groundless divides into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and understanding, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby the absolute develop into the personal God. In this way Schelling endeavors to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism and pantheism, and to remove the difficulties which arise for pantheism from the fact of evil, as well as from the concepts of personality and of freedom.