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Rh period of the philosophy of nature to that of the philosophy of religion. If experience reveals not only differences, but even antitheses which cannot be harmonized, it must mean that a fall from the eternal harmony must have taken place. Historical evolution implies the mastery of disharmonies and the restoration of harmonious unity. Just as he had made nature the preliminary of mind in the Philosophy of Nature, he now likewise construes history as a series of stages; not only the former but the latter is likewise an Odyssey of the soul.

Schelling elaborated this idea more fully in the treatise Philosophische Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhdngenden Gegenstande (1809). Schelling's philosophy of religion was considerably influenced by the writings of Jacob Bohme, as this treatise in particular shows. Schelling seeks to prove that the only way God can be conceived as a personal being is to assume in Him an obscure principle of nature which can be clarified and harmonized by the unfolding of the divine life. The infinite personality must contain the antithesis within itself, whilst the finite personalities discover their antitheses outside themselves. But without opposition and resistance there can be no life and no personality. Hence God could not be God if there were not something within him which is not yet God.

Just as Schelling had read mind into nature in his Philosophy of Nature, so he reads nature into the absolute mind in his Philosophy of Religion. But that obscure principle contains the possibility of evil, according to Schelling even as for Böhme. That which was merely intended to be principle and matter may separate, i. e.