Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/570

560 enabled him to proceed to Jena, and to establish himself there on a more independent footing. He gave lectures on philosophy as a private teacher (privat-docent) in the university. His friend Schelling, although some years his junior, had got the start of him, and was settled as a professor (extraordinary) in the same place. Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, lived at Weimar, which was not far off, so that he was in contact with the most brilliant intellectual society which Germany at that time afforded. The genius of Schelling, as prolific as it was precocious, had by this time given to the world a series of profound philosophical disquisitions. At the age of nineteen he had shown a wonderful insight into the philosophy of Fichte, and had even carried it forward into a new development; and when Hegel now joined him he had just published his 'System of Transcendental Idealism.' Hegel had no pretensions to such pliancy of intellect and rapid power of composition; but he, too, was laying the foundations of a system, which, although identical in its groundwork, or nearly so, with that of Schelling, was intended to be far more rigorous and logical in its procedure. It was, indeed, in their method that the main difference between the two philosophers lay. Schelling was of opinion that the citadel of truth was to be carried by a coup de main, by a genial, "intellectual intuition." Hegel conceived that it was to be won only by slow sap and regular logical approaches.