Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/472

 45° SCHELLING. which SchelHng introduces into the transcendental philoso- phy. The Kantio-Fichtean moraiism, with its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the Natiir- philosophie by Herder's physicism. ^ " Nature is a priori'' (everything individual in it is pre- determined by the whole, by the Idea of a nature in gen- eral) ; hence the forms of nature can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as subject, becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being, product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature, as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed t.wo opposite activities, one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the universal law of pola rity. The absolute produc- tivity strives toward an infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that some- thing knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universaliz- ing force, and a negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the creative activity manifests itself in various ways : in the striving for development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of nature ; all nature is a connected development. Because of the oppo- sition in the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite polar forces is the type of all con- figuration in nature. With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles SchelHng combines Kantian ideas, especially