Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/182

Rh ''Gravity, light and the organism represent the various levels through which nature ascends to mind. ''The relation of contraction and expansion varies on the different levels; in the organism they coexist in inner unity, and as a matter of fact we are then likewise already at the threshold of consciousness. Whilst mechanical natural science, with its atoms and laws of motion, reveals to us only the external aspect of nature, as lifeless objectivity, it is the business of natural philosophy to explain nature as it really is in its inmost essence, whereby it at the same time appears as the preliminary step to mind. On the lower levels the objective element predominates, on the higher levels the subjective element. These three levels of nature correspond to knowledge, action and art in the realm of mind (System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 1800). Art portrays directly and concretely what philosophy can describe only abstractly. Here therefore the two tendencies of being manifest themselves in perfect unity. Schelling could no longer regard the Absolute as pure ego because the relation of the latter to the nonego was wholly external. The distinction between the subjective and the objective vanishes entirely in the Absolute; it is pure identity. Antitheses exist only for finite mind.

Schelling's Philosophy of Nature is really nothing more than a symbolic interpretation of nature, not an explanation of nature. He is even conscious of this fact himself. In one of his best essays (Methode des akademischen Studiums, 1803) he remarks: "Empiricism contemplates being as an object apart from its meaning, because the nature of a symbol is such as to possess its own peculiar life within itself. In this isolation it can appear only as a finite object, in an absolute negation of