[See page image]

Page 232

dano Bruno (qq.v.) prepared him to work this out into the philosophy of identity, which first emerged in Zeitschrift fur speculative Physik in 1801 (a journal which he issued jointly with Hegel), but appears fused with Platonic idealism in Bruno, oder caber das gottliehe and naturliche Prineip der Dinge (Berlin, 1802), and expanded in popular form in Vorlesungen caber die Methode des akademisehen Studiums (Tii bingen, 1803), which has been pronounced a model of literary form. The absolute is defined as absolute reason or the total indifference of subject and object. The highest law of its existence is absolute identity, or undifferentiated unity. Everything that exists is this absolute itself. It is the universe itself, not the cause of it. It is present in everything as both subject and object, ideal and real, with a preponderance of either one over the other. Theology, as the science of the absolute and divine essence, is the highest synthesis of philosophical and historical knowledge. The antithesis of the real and ideal occurs in the contrast of Hellenism and Christianity. The former illustrates the unconscious identity of nature; the ideal lay concealed in visible gods and polytheism. This was followed by separation or fate at the close of the ancient world. Christianity, as the inception of the period of providence, follows with the reconciled unity, and with God revealed. The incarnation of God is from eternity. The ideas of Christianity symbolized in its dogmas have a speculative significance. The fundamental dogma of the Trinity means that the eternal Son of God, born of the essence of the Father of all things, is the finite itself as it exists in the eternal intuition of God, who at the culmination of his phenomenal manifestation in Christ as suffering God terminates the world of finiteness and opens that of the supremacy of the Spirit. The consummation of the process is the regeneration of esoteric Christianity and the proclamation of the absolute gospel, or the self-consciousness of the absolute in which subject and object disappear, or the becoming of God.

In consequence of his polemics Schelling left Jena, and was professor at Wiirzburg, 1803-16. Under leave of absence he lectured at Stuttgart in 1810. In the mean time he was given more and more to syncretism and mysticism. In his Philosophic and Religion (Tiibingen, 1804), he betrays a neoplatonic influence in affirming that finiteness and corporeality are the products of a falling away from the absolute as the means of the perfect revelation of God. Theosophical are the views in Untersuchungen caber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Landshut, 1809), under the influence of Jakob Boehme (q.v.). He distinguishes in God, according to the mystics, three degrees: indifference, the primordial basis or "abyss " of divine nature; differentiation of this into ground and existence; and the identity or reconciliation of the two. By this he explains the origin of evil. The first, which is only the beginning of the divine nature, without form or personality, is a dark, negative ground, the basis of reality; it is that which is in God, yet not God himself. This, which is described as a certain yearning for selfassertion, is the basis of the bare existence of all things. Man, who is immanent in God, is capable

of freedom; i. e., of enlightenment. By virtue of the dark ground, he has a particular will; as gifted by understanding he is the organ of the universal will. The separation of the two is the occasion of evil or imperfection.

The feud with F. H. Jacobi (q.v.), president of the academy, who severely assailed these views, led to Schelling's departure from Munich in 1820. He lectured several semesters at Erlangen, and was ordinary professor of the new university at Munich, 1827-10. During this period, restive criticisms of the system of Hegel, who, though his senior yet his follower, had resolved his principle of absolute identity into a system of synthetic logic, began to appear. Lecturing at Berlin, 1840-116, he further develops the departure made in his treatise on freedom. God, he now acclaims, may indeed be conceived as the culmination of a process in thought, but not of an objective process. Therefore, he partly reverses his position and declares the philosophy of Hegel as well as his own pantheistic system to be merely negative, which he supplements with a positive philosophy. Falling back on Kant's criticism of the ontological argument, he finds God not immanent in thought, but transcendent; not at the end of the process, but absolute first. God creates by a free act of will; and in positive philosophy, the real universe thus created, as well as the real God viewed as an objective principle, are not subjects of the speculative reason, but of experience, guided by the documents of revelation. The products of the theoretical are merely preparatory, affording ideals as means to the positive. Schelling distinguishes in absolute Spirit possibility of being, pure being, and absolute free being, which in creation reveal themselves as the three potenciesunconscious will, or causa materialis; conscious will, or causa efciens; and their union, causa finalis. They furnish the basis of the Trinity. In nature potencies, at the end of revelation, or creation, they are three perfect personalities in one God. The potencies which exist in man as God's image suffered separation by the fall. In consequence, the second was deprived of its divine reality and was degraded to a potency operating only in purely natural ways. It regains its total freedom in the consciousness of man, through the theogonic process; first in mythology and then in revelation. This was the subject of his philosophy of mythology and revelation, respectively, in his "Philosophy of Religion" (in Sdmtlichen Werke, 14 vols., Stuttgart, 1856-61). Following the suggestion of Fichte, Schelling divides the Christian era into Petrine Christianity, or Catholicism; Pau'ine, or Protestantism; and the Johannean with its idea of the Logos, the Church of the Future. See IDEALISM, II., §§ 6, 8; PANTHEISM, §7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Besides the works on the history of philosophy (e.g., by J. E. Erdmsnn, 3 vols., London, 1892-98; W. Windelbond, New York, 1893; F. Ueberweg, ed. Heinze. 9th ed., Berlin, 1901-05) consult. F. K&ppen, Schellinj s behre, oder das Ganze der Ph.ilosophie des absoluten Nichds, Hamburg, 1803; F. Berg, Sextus, oder user the absolute Erkenneniss von Schelling WOrzburg, 1804; J. C. G&tz, Anti-Sestus, oder fiber die absolute Erkenntniss von Schellin4, Heidelberg, 1807; S. T. Coleridge, Biographia literaria, London, 1817; J. Fries, Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling, in Polemische Schriften, vol. i., Halle, 1824;