Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

“ Schelling promised magnificent operations in the heyday of his youth, on a basis very similar to that laid down in this first proposition. But the world has been waiting for the fulfilment of these promises,—for the fruits of that exuberant blossom,—during a period of more than fifty years. May its hopes be one day realised! No man is fitter, if he would but take the pains, than this octogenarian seer, to show that Speculation is not all one "barren heath." ”

“ 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. ”

“ His attempt to unite the process of the physical sciences in one affiliated line with the study of man, both in his individual constitution and historic development, has also had a very considerable result out of his own country. No one, for example, who compares the philosophic method of Schelling with the 'Philosophie positive' of Auguste Comte, can have the slightest hesitation as to the source from which the latter virtually sprang. ”

“ It shows how a man's eyes may be open to faults in others, which he either does not see in himself, or seeing, does not choose or is unable to amend. "The philosophers of Germany," says Schelling, "have been for so long in the habit of philosophising merely among themselves, that by degrees their thoughts and language have become further and further removed, even in Germany, from the understanding of general readers ”

“ Friedrich William Schelling (1775-1854) is the typical philosopher of Romanticism. Having no critical prejudices whatever, in this youthful treatises which constitute the exclusive basis of his philosophical significance, he proclaims a new science which is intended to transcend all the antitheses still confronting the traditional science. ”

“ In the history of knowledge, Germans are represented only by doubtful names, they have been able to produce only "unconscious" swindlers (this word applies to Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, just as well as to Kant or Leibniz; they were all mere [Pg 127] Schleiermachers) . [6] The Germans must not have the honour of seeing the first upright intellect in their history of intellects, that intellect in which truth ultimately got the better of the fraud of four thousand years, reckoned as one with the German intellect. ”

“ Schelling is too ambitious, too eager to be the Grand Seignior of the allein-selig Philosophie to be altogether a trustworthy philosopher. But he is a man of great genius; and, however unsatisfied with his conclusions, one cannot read him without being either whetted or improved. ”

“ Amongst the many sagacious sayings of the patient and profound thinkers of Germany, not the least noteworthy was Schelling’s affirmation that the phenomena of instinct are some of the most important of all phenomena, and capable of serving as a very touch-stone whereby the value of competing theories of the universe may be effectually tested. His prescience has been justified by our experience. The greatest scientific event of the present time is the wide acceptance of the theory of evolution, and its use as a weapon of offence and defence. ”

“ Schelling was a man of ardent, sanguine temperament, and it was his natural proclivities that gave rise to his system of philosophy. He attributes a real existence to the material as well as to the immaterial world, but permits it a different mode of existence. He makes history a necessity. This natural philosophy conveys to us no knowledge of God, and the little it does reveal appears opposed to religion. ”

“ But the loss of all interest in the life of the day is still more markedly shown in Schelling's absorption in nature. As the mystics held that it was the working of the imagination of God which created the world, so Schelling held that it was the corresponding power in man which alone gave ideal reality to the productions of his intellect. ”

“ With the opponents of rationalism Schelling agrees that we cannot reach the inner meaning of reality, "the living, moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. ”

“ Schelling's ground is that there is a common nature or quality in all intelligence; that man, through his participation in this common nature, is, so far, a pure—that is, a non-particular or universal—intelligence, and hence is, so far, capable of cognising universal or unconditioned truth. ”

“ There is a revival of interest in his philosophy, and new editions of his books are now being published.
Like most philosophers of note, Schelling reckons with the various tendencies of his times. With idealism he interprets the universe as identical in essence with what we find in our innermost selves; it is at bottom a living dynamic process. If that is so, nature cannot be a merely externalized obstacle for the ego, nor a dead static spatial mechanical system; as the expression of an active spiritual principle there must be reason and purpose in it. ”

“ This does not imply that works of speculative thought are chiefly to be weighed in the critic's scales as mere exercises of style; but it does imply that a philosophy whose contents cannot be made intelligible to every well-educated people, and expressed in every cultivated language, cannot be the true and universal philosophy." Such were Schelling's words in 1834, in passing sentence on the speculations generally of his countrymen. ”

“ As it is hard for common apprehension to conceive this absolute, and seize upon this identity of thought and thing, Schelling invented a faculty of mind expressly for the comprehension of such profound doctrines of philosophy. He called it intellectual intuition. Those who possess it not—and it is by no means general—must be content to live without philosophy. Nor can those on whom nature has failed to bestow this intellectual intuition, acquire it by any study or industry of their own. Philosophus nascitur, non fit. ”

“ Schelling’s hero, in whose character he speaks, is supposed to be trying to play the irreligious materialist, whom the priests have been driving to despair, and who at last rebels. Nature is his religion, he says. He loves good cheer and fair faces, and he hates superstition. Isn’t this world of the senses after all the genuine thing? ”

“ In like manner, annihilating consciousness in order to reconstruct it, Schelling has never yet been able to connect the faculties conversant about the conditioned, with the faculty of absolute knowledge. One simple objection strikes us as decisive, although we do not remember to have seen it alleged. 'We awaken,' says Schelling, 'from the intellectual intuition as from 'the state of death, we awaken through reflection.' [3] We cannot, at the same moment, be in the intellectual intuition and in common consciousness ”

“ To those who cannot rise beyond a philosophy of reflection, Schelling candidly allows that the doctrine of the absolute can appear only as a series of contradictions; and he has at least the negative merit of having clearly exposed the absurdity of a philosophy of the unconditioned, as founded on a knowledge by difference, if he has utterly failed in positively proving the possibility of such a philosophy, as founded on a knowledge in identity, and through an absorption into the absolute. ”

“ It may be more instructive, as well as more practicable, to confine ourselves to a smaller field—to consider, namely, the main point at issue between Schelling and some of the leading philosophers of this country. Perhaps some light will be thrown on his philosophy, its drift and purpose will perhaps become apparent in our attempt, not indeed to settle, but to adjust the terms of this dispute.
It is admitted on all hands, that truth of one kind or another is the proper aim of philosophy. But there are two kinds of truth: truth as it exists in itself, and truth as it exists in relation to us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By means of this recognition, science, in Schelling's philosophy, attained its absolute standpoint, and although art had previously begun to assert its peculiar nature and dignity in relation to the highest interests of humanity, yet it was now that the actual notion of art and its place in scientific theory were discovered. Art was now accepted, even if erroneously in one respect, which this is not the place to discuss, yet in its higher and genuine vocation. ”

“ In his philosophy of identity, nature and mind are conceived as two different aspects of one and the same principle, which is both mind and nature, subject and object, ego and non-ego. All things are identical in essence but differentiated in the course of evolution. It was not inconsistent with these tenets that Schelling sought, in his last period, to discover the meaning of universal history in the obscure beginnings of mythology and revelation rather than in the lucid regions of an advanced civilization. ”

“ In 1841, Schelling was called to the chair of philosophy in Berlin, and in the winter of 1841-1842 he gave his lectures on "The Philosophy of Revelation" which caused the Berlin reactionaries to hail him as their great ally. The veteran rationalist — he was eighty years old — was transported with rage. He had had the lectures taken down for him, and he published them with critical remarks under the title "The Philosophy of Revelation at length Revealed, and set forth for General Examination, by Dr. H. E. G. Paulus" (Darmstadt, 1842) . ”

“ In the third period the philosophy of identity becomes the basis for a still higher system in which the influence of German theosophy (Jacob Böhme) is apparent; with the exception of Philosophy and Religion, 1804, the Treatise on Human Freedom, 1809, and a few others, the works of this period did not appear until after Schelling's death. His previous philosophy is now called by him "negative philosophy;" the higher or positive philosophy has as its aim the rational construction of the history of the universe, or the history of creation, upon the basis of the religious ideas of peoples ”

“ Schelling published his Transcendental Idealism in 1800. In the next year he published his System of Identity in the hope of finding some common ground for his two preceding points of view. For Nature is not absolute, but is a limited objective Ego ”

“ Whereas Fichte regarded self as the Absolute, von Schelling conceived infinite and eternal Mind to be the all-pervading Cause. Realization of the Absolute is made possible by intellectual intuition which, being a superior or spiritual sense, is able to dissociate itself from both subject and object. Kant's categories of space and time von Schelling conceived to be positive and negative respectively, and material existence the result of the reciprocal action of these two expressions. ”

“ Although those absolute principles which appear to characterize the European nations at this time, have much less influence on real life and on the social relations in Germany than in any other country; yet the false spirit of the absolute seems to be quite native to German science and philosophy ”

“ Viewed from one aspect, Schelling's philosophy is not without a certain charm. "Spirit is invisible nature, nature is visible spirit." In this view of things, if mind loses its pre-eminence, nature, or the visible world, is exalted and spiritualised. It is a system likely to fascinate the poet and the artist, and we believe it has had a recognised influence on the cultivation of the fine arts in Germany. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The unconditioned (truth in itself) is beyond his grasp. But it is plain that this argument proves too much; it proves that the unconditioned truth is equally beyond the grasp of Omniscience; because it is surely manifest that omniscience can know things only in relation to itself; and therefore Omniscience is just as incompetent as man is to apprehend the unconditioned, if this must be apprehended out of all relation to intelligence. If that be the idea of the unconditioned, Schelling's conception of philosophy must be given up, and Hamilton's must be accepted. ”

“ As the highest and greatest of man’s endowments, it was almost deified, whatever did not appear at once and easily explicable by reason, being forthwith and indiscriminately pronounced a prejudice, and, as such, to be got rid of with all diligence. In this state of things, modern German philosophy commenced its career with attempting to show that this sovereign reason, which had set itself forth as the first and highest in man, is extremely defective, and comes far short of the requisitions both of science and life. ”