Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/469

 SCHELLING. 447 their sharp definition ; and in the endeavor to show the unity of the universe, both in the great and in the little, especially to show the unity of nature and spirit, he dwells longer on the relationship of objects than on their antith- eses, which he is glad to reduce to mere quantitative and temporary differences. He adds to this an astonishing • mobility of thought, in virtue of which every offered suggestion is at once seized and worked into his own system, though in this the previous standpoint is uncon- sciously exchanged for a somewhat altered one. Schell- ing's philosophy is, therefore, in a continual state of flux, nearly every work shows it in a new form, and it is always - ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition. Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were, already familiar to Schelling as a pupil at Tubingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who exerted a trans- forming influence on his system, to be followed later by Neoplatonism and Bohme's mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse - with his contemporaries Kielmeyer, Stefiens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others. Omitting his early adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished in Schelling's thinking. The first period (1797-1800) includes • the epoch-making feat of his youth, the philosophy of nature,. and, as an equally legitimate second part of his system, - the philosophy of spirit or transcendental philosophy. The latter is a supplementary recasting of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, while in the former Schelling follows Kant and * Herder. The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate parts, the philosophy of nature and the philoso- phy of spirit, and as a fundamental discipline, a science _, of the absolute, the philosophy of identity, which may be ^ characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean basis, Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on this form of Schelling's philosophy. With the year 1809, after the signs of a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its third, the theosophical, period, the period of the positive philoso-/-^ phy, in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage. The former is represented by the doctrine of freedom