Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/414

Rh 392 SCHELLING that Schelling remains for the philosophic student but a moment of historical value in the development of thought, and that his works have for the most part ceased now to have more than historic interest. Throughout his thinking bears the painful impress of hurry, incompleteness, and spasmodic striving after an ideal which could only be attained by patient, laborious, and methodic effort. Brilliant contributions there are without doubt to the evolution of a philosophic idea, but no systematic fusion of all into a whole. It is not unfair to connect the apparent failings of Schilling's philosophizing with the very nature of the thinker and with the historical accidents of his career. In the writ- ings of his early manhood, for example, more particularly those making up Naturphilosophie, one finds in painful abundance the evidences of hastily-acquired knowledge, impatience of the hard labour of minute thought, over-confidence in the force of individual genius, and desire instantaneously to present even in crudest fashion the newest idea that has dawned upon the thinker. Schelling was prematurely thrust into the position of a foremost productive thinker ; and when the lengthened period of quiet meditation was at last forced upon him there unfortunately lay before him a system which achieved what had dimly been involved in his ardent and impetuous desires. It is not possible to acquit Schelling of a certain disingenuousness in regard to the Hegelian philosophy ; and if we claim for him perfect disinterestedness of view we can do so only by imposing on him the severer condem- nation of deficient insight. It was a natural concomitant of this continuous hurry under which Schelling's successive efforts at constructive work were carried out that he should have been found at all stages supporting himself by calling to his aid the forms of some other system. The successive phases of his development might without injustice be characterized by reference to these external supports. Thus Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the Mystics, and finally, the great Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commen- tators, give respectively colouring to particular works in which Schelling unfolds himself. At the same time it would be unjust to represent Schelling as merely borrowing from these external sources. There must be allowed to him genuine philosophic spirit and no small measure of philosophic insight. Of the philosophic afflatus he was in no want ; and it might be fairly added that, under all the differences of exposition which seem to constitute so many differing Schellingian systems, there is one and the same philo- sophic effort and spirit. But what Schelling did want was power to work out scientifically, methodically, the ideas with which his spirit was filled and mastered. Hence he could only find expression for himself in forms of this or that earlier philosophy, and hence too the frequent formlessness of his own thought, the tendency to relapse into mere impatient despair of ever finding an adequate vehicle for transmitting thought. It is thus, moreover, a matter of indifference how one distributes or classifies the several forms and periods of Schelling's philosophic activity. Whether one adopts as basis the external form, i.e., the foreign mode of speculation laid under contribution, or endeavours to adhere closely to inner differences of view, the result is very much the same. There is one line of speculative thought, in the development of which inevitable problems call for new methods of handling, while the results only in part can claim to have a place accorded to them in the history of philosophy. It is fair in dealing with Schelling's development to take into account the indications of his own opinion regarding its more significant momenta. In his own view the turning points seem to have been (1) the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature, the advance, in other words, to Natur- philosophie ; (2) the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, viz., the thought of the identical, indifferent, absolute substratum of both nature and spirit, the advance to Identitdtsvhilosophie ; (3) the opposition of negative and positive philosophy, an opposi- tion which is the theme of the Berlin lectures, but the germs of which may be traced back to 1804, and of which more tnan the germs are found in the work on freedom of 1809. Only what falls under the first and second of the divisions so indicated can b said to have discharged a function in developing philosophy ; only so much constitutes Schelling's philosophy proper. A very brief notice of the characteristic features of the three studia must here suffice. (1) Naturphilosophie. The Fichtean method had striven to exhibit the whole structure of reality as the necessary implication of self-consciousness. The fundamental features of knowledge, whether as activity or as sum of apprehended fact, and of conduct had been deduced as elements necessary in the attainment of self- consciousness. Fichtean idealism therefore at once stood out negatively, as abolishing the dogmatic conception of the two real worlds, subject and object, by whose interaction cognition and practice arise, and as amending the critical idea which retained with dangerous caution too many fragments of dogmatism ; positively, as insisting on the unity of philosophical interpretation and as supplying a key to the form or method by which a completed philosophic system might be constructed. But the Fichtean teach- ing appeared on the one hand to identify too closely the ultimate ground of the universe of rational conception with the finite, indi- vidual spirit, and on the other hand to endanger the reality of the world of nature by regarding it too much after the fashion of sub- jective idealism, as mere moment, though necessitated, in the existence of the finite thinking mind. It was almost a natural consequence that Fichte never succeeded in amalgamating with his own system the {esthetic view of nature to which the Kritik of Judgment had pointed as an essential component in any complete philosophy. From Fichte's position Schelling started. From Fichte he derived the ideal of a completed whole of philosophic conception ; from Fichte he derived the formal method to which for the most part he continued true. The earliest writings tended gradually towards the first important advance. Nature must not be con- ceived as merely abstract limit to the infinite striving of spirit, as a mere series of necessary thoughts for mind. It must be that and more than that. It must have reality for itself, a reality which stands in no conflict with its ideal character, a reality the inner structure of which is ideal, a reality the root and spring of which is spirit. Nature as the sum of that which is objective, intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self- consciousness, appear thus as equally real, as alike exhibiting ideal structure, as parallel with one another. The philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy are the two complementary portions of philosophy as a whole. Animated with this new conception Schelling made his hurried rush to Naturphilosophie, and with the aid of Kant and of frag- mentary knowledge of contemporary scientific movements, threw off in quick succession the Ideen, the Weltseele, and the Erster Entwurf. Naturphilosophie, which thus became an historical fact, has had scant mercy at the hands of modern science ; and un- doubtedly there is much in it, even in that for which Schelling alone is responsible, for which only contempt can be our feeling. Schelling, one must say, had neither the strength of thinking nor the acquired knowledge necessary to hold the balance between the abstract treatment of cosmological notions and the concrete researches of special science. His efforts after a construction of natural reality are bad in themselves and gave rise to a wearisome flood of perfectly useless physical speculation. Yet it would be unjust to ignore the many brilliant and sometimes valuable thoughts that are scattered throughout the writings on Naturphilosophie, thoughts to which Schelling himself is but too frequently untrue. Regarded merely as a criticism of the notions with which scientific interpretation proceeds, these writings have still importance and might have achieved more had they been untainted by the tendency to hasty, ill-considered, a priori anticipations of nature. Nature, as having reality for itself, forms one completed whole. Its manifoldness is not then to be taken as excluding its funda- mental unity ; the divisions which our ordinary perception and thought introduce into it have not absolute validity, but are to be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative energy or complex of forces which is the inner aspect, the soul of nature. Such inner of nature we are in a position to apprehend and constructively to exhibit to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, for it is the same spirit, though uncon- scious, of which we become aware in self-consciousness. It is the realization of spirit. Nor is the variety of its forms imposed upon it from without ; there is neither external teleology in nature, nor mechanism in the narrower sense. Nature is a whole and forms itself ; within its range we are to look for no other than natural explanations. The function of Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal. The incessant change which experience brings before us, taken in conjunction with the thought of unity in productive force of nature, leads to the all-important conception of the duality, the polar opposition through which nature expresses itself in its varied products. The dynamical series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces ; light, with its subordinate processes, magnetism, electricity, and chemical action; organism, with its component phases of reproduc- tion, irritability, and sensibility. 1 Just as nature exhibits to us the series of dynamical stages of processes by which spirit struggles towards consciousness of itself, so the world of intelligence and practice, the world of mind, exhibits the series of stages through which self-consciousness with its inevitable oppositions and reconciliations develops in its ideal form. The theoretical side of inner nature in its successive grades from sensation to the highest form of spirit, the abstracting reason which emphasizes the difference of subjective and objective, leaves 1 The briefest and best account In Schelling himself of Naturphilosophie is that contained in the EMeitung ru dtm Erster Entwurf(S. W., iii.). The fullest and most lucid statement of Naturphilotophie is that given by K. Fischer in his Getch. d. n. Phil., vi. 433-G'J-'.