Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/566

556 attached themselves to his Natur-philosophie (such as Oken, Steffens, Carus, and others) have really done good service in spiritualising the physical philosophy of the age, without running into any censurable extravagance; while those who started from Schelling's later mysticism, such as Schubert, Baader, and others of smaller dimensions still, have done little else than revel in a species of sentimental mysticism, sometimes of more elevated, and at others of a very mean and trifling character. But the influence of Schelling was not confined to Germany. 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. The fundamental idea is, indeed, precisely the same as that of Schelling, with this difference only—that the idealistic language of the German speculator is here translated into the more ordinary language of physical science. That Comte borrowed his views from Schelling we can by no means affirm; but that the whole conception of the affiliation of the sciences in the order of their relative simplicity, and the expansion of the same law of development so as to include the exposition of human nature and the course of social progress, is all to be found there, no one in the