Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic

by William Wallace

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING.

Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where, besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly of the springs of thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes and the fears of the struggle republican France waged against the German powers, and had seen that Kantian criticism contained within it a fire which would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology. Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed through his college career in a very creditable but by no means brilliant way. Among his fellows he had gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior, breathed a deep impassioned zeal for that higher life of which the nobler spirits among the young then, as now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling, singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art, and the receptivity of genius to catch and string together the theories that rose to the top in science and letters, had already made his mark as a philosophic writer, while his senior compatriot, leading the inconspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up and widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in metaphysics trod the same lines as Fichte; but in 1797 (when he was aged 22) appeared his Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature. A year later he was lecturing at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and with Fichte, who, however, soon quitted the place. In 1800 appeared the System of Transcendental Idealism, and in 1801 the Exposition of my System; followed in 1802 by Bruno, and in 1803 by the Lectures on University Studies. Brief periods of academic teaching at Würzburg, Erlangen, and Munich, and after 1841 at Berlin, broke the silence which set in after his Inquiries into the nature of human liberty in 1809; but little certain was known to the outside public of the final standpoint till the publication of his collected works (1856-61).

An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon they historian as he surveys Schelling's career. Seldom had a thinker's life begun with better promise, and more distinguished performance; seldom had a nobler inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided and propelled the intellectual interest; seldom had expectation of greater things yet to come followed a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling. On one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the results of scientific discovery, at least in its more suggestive advances: on the other, a mastery of words and style which fitted him to hold his own amongst the literary leaders; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed to be religious, with the movement which sought lucem ex Oriente, and wisdom from the treasures of the world's purer youth. And yet—in the main—the net result, oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a great thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the remark that even books and thinkers have their fates, and that some momentary forgetfulness let the tide slip unused. But it is possible to be less oracularly-obscure: and without detracting from the splendid faculty and great achievement of Schelling to note some of the causes of his lapse into a mere episode.

In the first place, though his conception is of a system, his performance is only a succession of fragments. The nearest approach to an encyclopaedic exposition of his ideas is found in his popular Lectures on the Studies of University. More than once he starts on the task of exposition, but lets it break off about the middle. Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme of thought have slightly altered, and not merely does his philosophy profess at first to present two distinct sides, but these two sides of the shield vary. Thirdly, the interest in scientific novelties, always disposed to seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes on to fasten too greedily on the miraculous and mysterious night-side of nature, on magic powers and mystic discernments—a path which descends to the abyss of a 'positive,' i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy. The matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in Bavaria, and the Protestant theologian Paulus, once a friend, but latterly his bitterest foe) regard him as a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval obscurantism so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art renders him suspected: for there is an old quarrel between philosophy and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom is jealous of her gipsy rival. Ill-advised indications of a sense of lofty superiority to the average teacher increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents. Nor is it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to suggest that his first wife, Caroline, with all her wonderful attractions of intellect and character, and notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in encouragement and counsel, was too clever and too critical not to sow many jealousies, and to add through the female line to the ranks of those with whom he stood suspect.

But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was a certain excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn attacks down by an abnormal subjectivity which would fain reform the surroundings wherever he went. Schelling stood more apart—animated by an immense curiosity, a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but withal he seemed not to have his heart, deeply set and pledged to a distinctively human interest. His first love is the Romance in nature; and when he turns to history it is by preference to ages far remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it achieve its work by the instrumentality of Art. Religion seems to culminate for him in a mythology. Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat of a disease—whence philosophy is to carry us—almost magically if possible—to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an instrument towards a great end—and that end a godlike, even if you like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy, in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy—at least as Hegel understood it—is merely neither: but the life, which never can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. And so Schelling could not earn the confidence which only goes to those who are felt to be fellow-fighters with those they lead.

With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main current of philosophy, of streams of idea and research which had already exercised a stimulative effect on the tone and products of the higher literature of Germany. As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the English and Scotch 'empiricists' shake him out of his 'rationalist' dogmatism) Lessing—in a couple of pages On the reality of things outside God—threw doubts on the tenability of the ordinary deistic arrangement of his day, which set God there and man and his surroundings here, each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of Spinoza, and Spinoza by the light of Leibniz: and, if he emphasised the absolute right to the completest individual self-development on one hand, he no less declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is insulated, nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences.' 'I thank the Creator that I must,—must the best,' he adds (1774). Of his conversations on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either decried, or—what is worse—misunderstood, by the established masters of instruction, they were welcomed by a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of thought.

Amongst these one of the most interesting and influential was Herder. Herder, who had been amongst Kant's students in 1763, and who has expressed his admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed-by to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the Kantian system. The two men were mentally and morally of different types: and in Herder's case, a sense of injury, in the end, positively blinded him to the meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the Kantian system laboured throughout from the fault of a dead logical formalism and abstractness: it inhabited a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the fresh breath of nature and the growing life of history, and from the eternal spirit of divine truth: it undermined (so his experience at Weimar[1] indicated) the traditional faith, and inspired its 'adepts' with a revolutionary superciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried logicality, its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to his poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-historical soul. Man—in his concrete completeness, in his physical surroundings and his corporeal structure, in his social organisation, in his literary and artistic life, above all in his poetry and traditions of religion—was the theme of his studies; and he looked with distrust on every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the total unity of humanity by a criticism first of this, and then a criticism of that side of it, carried on separately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his; and the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth around the figures of that visionary world hangs with a charm and a confusion around the ultimate horizon of Herder's ideas.

In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an essay (published 1778) for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy on the subject of 'Sensation and Cognition in the human Soul.' Its fundamental points are that 'no psychology is possible, which is not at every step a distinct physiology': that 'cognition and volition are only one energy of the soul': that 'all our thought has arisen out of and through sensation, and in spite of all distillation still contains copious traces of it': that there are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing sensation,—'one energy, and elasticity of the soul, which reaches its height through the medium of language.' 'What is material, what non-material in man, I know not,' he says; 'but I am in the faith that nature has not fastened iron plates between them,' 'Man is a slave of mechanism (but a mechanism disguised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and fancies himself free,' 'Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new phase of expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity of our will': they vary directly with each other: and 'love therefore is the highest reason'—a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we will not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly more divine Spinoza, whose philosophy and ethics turn wholly upon this axis.'