History of Modern Philosophy Part 17

SCh.e.l.lING.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (von) Sch.e.l.ling was born January 27, 1775, at Leonberg (in Wurtemberg), and died August 20, 1854, at the baths of Ragatz (in Switzerland). In 1790-95 he attended the seminary at Tubingen, in company with Holderlin and Hegel, who were five years older than himself; at seventeen he published a dissertation on the Fall of Man, and a year later an essay on Religious Myths; and was called in 1798 from Leipsic-where, after several treatises[1] in explanation of the Science of Knowledge, he had issued, in 1797, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature-to Jena. In the latter place he became acquainted with his future wife, Caroline,[2] nee Michaelis (1763-1809), widow of Bohmer and at this time the brilliant wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. From 1803 to 1806 he served as professor in Wurzburg; then followed two residences of fourteen years each in Munich, separated by seven years in Erlangen: 1806-20 as Member of the Academy of Sciences and General Secretary of the Academy of the Plastic Arts (he received this latter position after delivering on the king's birthday his celebrated address on "The Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature," 1807); and 1827-41 as professor in the newly established university, and President of the Academy of Sciences. In 1812 Sch.e.l.ling married his second wife, Pauline Gotter. Besides various journals[3] and the works to be noticed later, two polemic treatises should be mentioned, the Exposition of the True Relation of the Philosophy of Nature to the Improved Doctrine of Fichte, 1806, in which his former friend is charged with plagiarism, and the Memorial of the Treatise on Divine Things by Herr Jacobi, 1812, which answers a bitter attack of Jacobi still more bitterly. From this on our philosopher, once so fond of writing, becomes silent.[4] The often promised issue of the positive philosophy, which had already been twice commenced in print (The Ages of the World, 1815; Mythological Lectures, 1830), was both times suspended. Being called to the Berlin Academy by Frederick William IV., in order to counterbalance the prevailing Hegelianism, Sch.e.l.ling delivered lectures in the university also (on Mythology and Revelation), which he ceased, however, when notes taken by his hearers were printed without his consent.[5] His collected works were published in fourteen volumes (1856-61) under the care of his son, K.E.A. Sch.e.l.ling.[6]

[Footnote 1: On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General, On the Ego as Principle of Philosophy, both in 1795; Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, 1796; Essays in Explanation of the Science of Knowledge, 1797.]

[Footnote 2: Karoline, Letters, edited by G. Waitz, 1871.]

[Footnote 3: Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (with Hegel), 1802; Zeitschrift fur spekulative Physik, 1800 (continued as Neue Zeitschrift fur spekulative Physik); Jahrbucher der Medizin als Wissenschaft (with Marcus), 1806-08; Allgemeine Zeitschrift von Deutschen fur Deutsche, 1813.]

[Footnote 4: Besides a supplement to Die Weltalter and his inaugural lecture at Berlin, he published only two prefaces, one to Viktor Cousin uber franzosische und deutsche Philosophie, done into German by Hubert Beckers, 1834, and one to Steffens's Nachgela.s.sene Schriften, 1846.]

[Footnote 5: Paulus, Die enduch offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1843. Frauenstadt had previously published a sketch from this later doctrine, 1842.]

[Footnote 6: On Sch.e.l.ling cf. the Lectures by K. Rosenkranz, 1843; the articles by Heyder in vol. xiii. of Herzog's Realencyclopadie fur protestantische Theologie, 1860, and Jodl in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; R. Haym, Die romantische Schule, 1870; Aus Sch.e.l.lings Leben, in Briefen, edited by Plitt, 3 vols., 1869-70. [Cf. also Watson's Sch.e.l.ling's Transcendental Idealism (Griggs's Philosophical Cla.s.sics, 1882); and several translations from Sch.e.l.ling in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.-TR.]]

The leading motive in Sch.e.l.ling's thinking is an unusually powerful fancy, which gives to his philosophy a lively, stimulating, and attractive character, without making it to a like degree logically satisfactory. If the systems of Fichte and Hegel, which in their content are closely related to Sch.e.l.ling's, impress us by their logical severity, Sch.e.l.ling chains us by his lively intuition and his suggestive power of feeling his way into the inner nature of things. With him a.n.a.logies outweigh reasons; he is more concerned about the rich content of concepts than about their sharp definition; and in the endeavor to show the unity of the universe, both in the great and in the little, especially to show the unity of nature and spirit, he dwells longer on the relationship of objects than on their ant.i.theses, which he is glad to reduce to mere quant.i.tative and temporary differences. He adds to this an astonishing mobility of thought, in virtue of which every offered suggestion is at once seized and worked into his own system, though in this the previous standpoint is unconsciously exchanged for a somewhat altered one. Sch.e.l.ling's philosophy is, therefore, in a continual state of flux, nearly every work shows it in a new form, and it is always ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition. Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were already familiar to Sch.e.l.ling as a pupil at Tubingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who exerted a transforming influence on his system, to be followed later by Neoplatonism and Bohme's mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse with his contemporaries Kielmeyer, Steffens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others. Omitting his early adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished in Sch.e.l.ling's thinking. The first period (1797-1800) includes the epoch-making feat of his youth, the philosophy of nature, and, as an equally legitimate second part of his system, the philosophy of spirit or transcendental philosophy. The latter is a supplementary recasting of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, while in the former Sch.e.l.ling follows Kant and Herder. The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate parts, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, and as a fundamental discipline, a science of the absolute, the philosophy of ident.i.ty, which may be characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean basis. Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on this form of Sch.e.l.ling's philosophy. With the year 1809, after the signs of a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its third, the theosophical, period, the period of the positive philosophy, in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage. The former is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob Bohme; the latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to Aristotle and the Gnostics. In the first period the absolute for Sch.e.l.ling is creative nature; in the second, the ident.i.ty of opposites; in the third it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of the contraries to their overcoming. In neither of these advances is it Sch.e.l.ling's intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each case only to add a supplement. That which has. .h.i.therto been the whole is retained as a part. The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though with a reversed procedure; then the theory of ident.i.ty a.s.sumes a place above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to the previous negative (rational) philosophy.

1a. Philosophy of Nature.

Sch.e.l.ling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science, the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise? They agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts, outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these actions. Nature exists in order that the ego may develop. But while Fichte correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated it merely as a dead tool, as a pa.s.sive, merely posited non-ego. Nature is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order, striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further, working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject, Sch.e.l.ling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne. The threefold division, "infinite original activity-nature or object-individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature, natura naturans. Sch.e.l.ling's aim is to show how from the object a subject arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem if he conceived natural objects-in the highest of which, man, he makes conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself-as themselves the products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Sch.e.l.ling by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the natura naturata appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds. Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially identical: "That which is posited out of consciousness is in its essence the same as that which is posited in consciousness also." Therefore "the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the preliminary stage, not the ant.i.thesis, of spirit; history, a continuation of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real development-series-these are ideas from Herder which Sch.e.l.ling introduces into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the Naturphilosophie by Herder's physicism.

"Nature is a priori" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as subject, becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being, product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature, as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities, one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the universal law of polarity. The absolute productivity strives toward an infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a negative, limiting, r.e.t.a.r.ding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the creative activity manifests itself in various ways: in the striving for development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in the nature-ground between the stimulating and the r.e.t.a.r.ding activity, the law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.

With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles Sch.e.l.ling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves, because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other hand, Sch.e.l.ling took from Kielmeyer, whose address On the Relations of the Organic Forces, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is dominant in Sch.e.l.ling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation, which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Sch.e.l.ling thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorganic, and universal organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As Sch.e.l.ling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical explanation of life and the a.s.sumption of a specific vital force, so in all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the contending parties by means of mediating solutions. Thus, in the question of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light, endeavors to overcome the ant.i.thesis between Newton's emanation theory and the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).

[Footnote 1: Sch.e.l.ling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism, since it posits pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which qualities are to be explained.]

Sch.e.l.ling's philosophy of nature[1] proposes to itself three chief problems: the construction of general, indeterminate, h.o.m.ogeneous matter, with differences in density alone, of determinate, qualitatively differentiated matter and its phenomena of motion or the dynamical process, and of the organic process. For each of these departments of nature an original force in universal nature is a.s.sumed-gravity, light, and their copula, universal life. Gravity-this does not mean that which as the force of attraction falls within the view of sensation, for it is the union of attraction and repulsion-is the principle of corporeality, and produces in the visible world the different conditions of aggregation in solids, fluids, and gases. Light-this, too, is not to be confounded with actual light, of which it is the cause-is the principle of the soul (from it proceeds all intelligence, it is a spiritual potency, the "first subject" in nature), and produces in the visible world the dynamical processes magnetism, electricity, and chemism. The higher unity of gravity and light is the copula or life, the principle of the organic, of animated corporeality or the processes of growth and reproduction, irritability, and sensibility.

[Footnote 1: This is contained in the following treatises: Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797; On the World-soul, 1798; First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799; Universal Deduction of the Dynamical Process or the Categories of Physics (in the Zeitschrift fur spekulative Physik) 1800. In the above exposition, however, the modified philosophy of nature of the second period has also been taken into account.]

General matter or the filling of s.p.a.ce, arises from the co-operation of three forces: the centrifugal, which manifests itself as repulsion (first dimension), the centripetal, manifested as attraction (second dimension), and the synthesis of the two, manifested as gravity (third dimension). These forces are raised by light to a higher potency, and then make their appearance as the causes of the dynamical process or of the specific differences of matter. The linear function of magnetism is the condition of coherence; the surface force of electricity, the basis of the qualities perceivable by sense; the tri-dimensional force of the chemical process, in which the two former are united, produces the chemical qualities. Galvanism forms the transition to living nature, in which through the operation of the "copula" these three dynamical categories are raised to organic categories. To magnetism as the most general, and hence the lowest force, corresponds reproduction (the formative impulse, as nutrition, growth, and production, including the artistic impulse); electricity develops into irritability or excitability; the higher a.n.a.logue to the chemical process as the most individual and highest stage is sensibility or the capacity of feeling. (Such at least is Sch.e.l.ling's doctrine after Steffens had convinced him of the higher dignity of that which is individual, whereas at first he had made sensibility parallel with magnetism, and reproduction with chemism, because the former two appear most seldom, and the latter most frequently. Electricity and irritability always maintained their intermediate position.) With the awakening of feeling nature has attained its goal-intelligence. As inorganic substances are distinguished only by relative degrees of repulsion and attraction, so the differentiation of organisms is conditioned by the relation of the three vital functions: in the lower forms reproduction predominates, then irritability gradually increases, while in the highest forms both of these are subordinated to sensibility. All species, however, are connected by a common life, all the stages are but arrests of the same fundamental force. This accentuation of the unity of nature, which establishes a certain kinship between Sch.e.l.ling's philosophy of nature and Darwinism, was a great idea, which deserves the thanks of posterity in spite of such defects as its often sportive, often heedlessly bold reasoning in details.

The parallelism of the potencies of nature, as we have developed it by leaving out of account the numerous differences between the various expositions of the Naturphilosophie, may be shown by a table:

I. UNIVERSAL NATURE. II. INORGANIC NATURE III. ORGANIC NATURE.

(ORGANIZING) 3. Copula 3. Organization or Life. | ___^___ /Chemical G | /Sensi- Man.

/ |Process (3d| a | |bility. __^__ 2. Light 2.Dynamical|Dimen- | l | | / (Soul). Process. < sion)="" |="" v="" |="" |irritabi-="" male="" b.="" at-="" (determi-="" |electri-="" |="" a="" |_|lity.="" (="Light)" traction.|="" nate="" |city="" (2d="" di-="">n |Animal. >1. Gra- matter.) | mension.) | i | | vity 1. Indeter- |Magnetism | s |Repro- Female a. Re- | (Body) minate |(1st Di- | m |duction (-Gravity) pulsion / matter. mension.) / Plant.

1b. Transcendental Philosophy.

The philosophy of nature explained the products of nature teleologically, deduced them from the concept or the mission of nature, by ignoring the mechanical origin of physical phenomena and inquiring into the significance of each stage in nature in view of this ideal meaning of the whole. It asks what is the outcome of the chemical process for the whole of nature, what is given by electricity, by magnetism, etc.-what part of the general aim of nature is attained, is realized through this or that group of phenomena. The philosophy of spirit given in the System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800, finds itself confronted by corresponding questions concerning the phenomena of intelligence, of morals, and of art. Here again Sch.e.l.ling does not trace out the mechanics of the soul-life, but is interested only in the meaning, in the teleological significance of the psychical functions. His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the example of the Wissenschaftslehre.

Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways. With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The theoretical part of the system explains the representation of objective reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,-and follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with s.p.a.ce and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is the continuation and completion of intuition;[1] intuition was unconscious production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom. The practical part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan legal condition is the goal of history, in which caprice and conformity to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit. History is the never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious and the unconscious) through human freedom. We are co-authors in the historical world-drama, and invent our own parts. Not until the third (the religious) period, in which he reveals himself as "providence," will G.o.d be; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt as "fate," and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears as the "plan of nature," G.o.d is not, but is only becoming.

[Footnote 1: With this transformation of the ant.i.thesis between knowledge and volition into a mere difference in degree, Sch.e.l.ling sinks back to the standpoint of Leibnitz. In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and will, as also that between intellect and sensibility. Schiller brings the contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic activity. Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Sch.e.l.ling combines both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original ident.i.ty. Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect proceed from will.]

An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the third, the aesthetic, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes use of Kant's theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic. Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and practical action, the ant.i.thesis of subject and object, is removed; in which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united. The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows the problem of philosophy, the ident.i.ty of the real and the ideal, solved in sensuous appearance. Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy; she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries. Poesy and philosophy (the aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old mythology-why should not this repeat itself in the future?

2. System of Ident.i.ty.

The a.s.sertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the ident.i.ty of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of ident.i.ty is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a basis for them, and in Sch.e.l.ling's exposition of which several phases must be distinguished.[1]

[Footnote 1: The philosophy of ident.i.ty is given in the following treatises: Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature (both in the Jahrbucher fur Medizin), 1806. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine: the additions to the second edition of the Ideas, 1803, and the Exposition, against Fichte, 1806.]

Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method of proof, Sch.e.l.ling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and speculation proves them void. While things appear particular to inadequate representation, the philosopher views them sub specie aeterni, in their per se, in their totality, in the ident.i.ty, as Ideas. To construe things is to present them as they are in G.o.d. But in G.o.d all things are one; in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)

The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid the finitude of the things of the world the self-ident.i.ty of the absolute breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not entirely lost: each particular existence is a definite expression of the absolute, and to it as such the character of ident.i.ty belongs, though in a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno's "monads"). The world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, ident.i.ty and totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective; everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always predominates. This Sch.e.l.ling terms quant.i.tative difference: the phenomena of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the ideal, only that in the former there is a preponderance of the real, in the latter a preponderance of the ideal.

At first Sch.e.l.ling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the finite: absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the ident.i.ty. In this, as the "form" of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not absolutely one, as they are in the being or "essence" of the absolute, but ideally (potentially) opposed, though one realiter. Later he does away with this distinction also, as existing for reflection alone, not for rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concerning the simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or the ident.i.ty of the ident.i.ty, in which fanciful description the dialogue Bruno pours itself forth. A further alteration is brought in by characterizing the absolute as the ident.i.ty of the finite and the infinite, and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the ideal or knowing. With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation of the Trinity akin to Lessing's. In the absolute or eternal the finite and the infinite are alike absolute. G.o.d the Father is the eternal, or the unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in G.o.d (before the falling away); the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite into the eternal.

In the construction of the real series Sch.e.l.ling proceeds still more schematically and a.n.a.logically 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 ident.i.ty, 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. Sch.e.l.ling was far outdone in fantastic a.n.a.logies 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 ident.i.ty, the return of the absolute to itself.

Unconditioned knowledge, as Sch.e.l.ling 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 G.o.d 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 Sch.e.l.ling 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 G.o.d, 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 Sch.e.l.ling's system of ident.i.ty 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 Sch.e.l.ling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spirit is still potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute ident.i.ty 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 Sch.e.l.ling 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 ident.i.ty had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the real world of absolute ident.i.ty 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 G.o.dhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy must yield to faith, Sch.e.l.ling, 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d himself in order to become actual G.o.d: He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the Middle Ages: if G.o.d 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 G.o.d could not have revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.) Sch.e.l.ling's study of Jacob Bohme, 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 Bohme's doctrine that G.o.d is living G.o.d 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, Sch.e.l.ling's theosophy now a.s.sumes the following form:

The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless G.o.d of Spinoza is to a.s.sume something in G.o.d which is not G.o.d himself, to distinguish between G.o.d as existent and that which is merely the ground of his existence or "nature in G.o.d." In G.o.d also the perfect proceeds from the imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself. The actual, perfect G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 G.o.d becomes revealed to self. By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its matter and instrument, G.o.d becomes actual G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding, it is the instrument of the universal will. In G.o.d 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 a.s.sistance-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 Tubingen, 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 G.o.d 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 ident.i.ty of the ground of existence and the existing G.o.d be brought about.

Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Sch.e.l.ling recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity of the beginning (G.o.d as Alpha) he terms indifference or groundlessness; the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (G.o.d as Omega) is called ident.i.ty 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 G.o.d. In this way Sch.e.l.ling endeavors to overcome the ant.i.thesis 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.

In the two moments of the absolute (nature in G.o.d-personal spirit) we recognize at once the ant.i.thesis of the real and ideal which was given in the philosophy of ident.i.ty. The chief difference between the mystical period and the preceding one consists in the fact that the absolute itself is now made to develop (from indifference to ident.i.ty, from the neither-nor to the as-well-as of the ant.i.thesis), and that there is conceded to the sense-world a reality which is more than apparent, more than merely present for imagination. That which facilitated this rapid, almost unceasing change of position for Sch.e.l.ling, and which at the same time concealed the fact from him, was, above all, the ambiguous and variable meaning of his leading concepts. The "objective," for example, now signifies unconscious being, becoming, and production, now represented reality, now the real, in so far as it is not represented, but only is. "G.o.d" sometimes means the whole absolute, sometimes only the infinite, spiritual moment in the absolute. Scarcely a single term is sharply defined, much less consistently used in a single meaning.

3b. Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation.

Once again Sch.e.l.ling is ready with a new statement of the problem. Philosophy is the science of the existent. In this, however, a distinction is to be made between the what (quid sit) and the that (quod sit), or between essence and existence. The apprehension of the essence, of the concept, is the work of reason, but this does not go as far as actual being. Rational philosophy cognizes only the universal, the possible, the necessary truths (whose contradictory is unthinkable), but not the particular and factual. This philosophy can only a.s.sert: If anything exists it must conform to these laws; existence is not given with the what. Hegel has ignored this distinction between the logical and the actual, has confused the rational and the real. Even the system of ident.i.ty was merely rational, i.e., negative, philosophy, to which there must be added, as a second part, a positive or existential philosophy, which does not, like the former, rise to the highest principle, to G.o.d, but starts from this supreme Idea and shows its actuality.

The content of this phase of Sch.e.l.ling's thought[1] was so unfruitful, and its influence so small, that brief hints concerning it must here suffice. First of all, the doctrine of the divine potencies and of creation is repeated in altered form, and then there is given a philosophy of the history of religion as a reflection of the theogonic process in human consciousness.

[Footnote 1: On Sch.e.l.ling's negative and positive philosophy, published in the four volumes of the second division of the Works, cf. Karl Groos, Die reine Vernunftwissenschaft, systematische Darstellung von Sch.e.l.lings negativer Philosophie, 1889; Konstantin Frantz, Sch.e.l.lings positive Philosophie, in three parts, 1879-80; Ed. von Hartmann, Gesammelte Studien und Aufsatze, 1876, p. 650 seq.; Ad. Planck, Sch.e.l.lings nachgela.s.sene Werke, 1858; also the essay by Heyder, referred to above].

The potencies are now called the infinite ability to be (inactive will, subject), pure being (being without potentiality, object), and spirit, which is free from the one-sidednesses of mere potentiality and of mere being, and master of itself (subject-object); to these is added, further-not as a fourth, but as that which has the three predicates and is wholly in each-the absolute proper, as the cause and support of these attributes. The original unity of the three forms is dissolved, as the first raises itself out of the condition of a mere potency and withdraws itself from pure being in order to exist for itself; the tension extends itself to the two others-the second now comes out from its selflessness, subdues the first, and so leads the third back to unity. In creation the three potencies stand related as the unlimited Can-be, the limiting Must-be, and the Ought-to-be, or operate as material, formal, and final causes, all held in undivided combination by the soul. It was not until the end of creation that they became personalities. Man, in whom the potencies come to rest, can divide their unity again; his fall calls forth a new tension, and thereby the world becomes a world outside of G.o.d. History, the process o progressive reconciliation between the G.o.d-estranged world and G.o.d, pa.s.ses through two periods-heathenism, in which the second person works as a natural potency, and Christianity, in which it works with freedom. In the discussion of these positive philosophy becomes a philosophy of mythology and revelation. The irresistible force of mythological ideas is explained by the fact that the G.o.ds are not creations of the fancy, but real powers, namely, these potencies, which form the substance of human conciousness.

The history of religion has for its starting-point the relative monotheism of humanity in its original unity, and for its goal the absolute monotheism of Christianity. With the separation into nations polytheism arises. This is partly simultaneous polytheism (a plurality of G.o.ds under a chief G.o.d), partly successive polytheism (an actual plurality of divinities, changing dynasties of several chief G.o.ds), and develops from star worship or Sabeism up to the religion of the Greeks. The Greek mysteries form the transition from mythology to revelation. While in the mythological process one or other of the divine potencies (Ground, Son, Spirit) was always predominant, in Christianity they return into unity. The true monotheism of revelation shows G.o.d as an articulated unity, in which the opposites are contained, as being overcome. The person of Christ const.i.tutes the content of Christianity, who, in his incarnation and sacrificial death, yields up the independence out of G.o.d which had come to him through the fall of man. The three periods in the development of the Church (real, substantial unity-ideality or freedom-the reconciliation of the two) were foreshadowed in the chief apostles: Peter, with his leaning toward the past, represents the Papal Church; Paul the thinker the Protestant Church; and the gentle John the Church of the future.

CHAPTER XII.

SCh.e.l.lING'S CO-WORKERS.