Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/473

 PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. 451 Kant's dynamism (matter is a force-product),* and his view of the organic (organisms are self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves, because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three organic functions sensibility, irritability, and repro- duction, on the other hand, Schelling took from Kiel- meyer, whose address On the Relations of the Organic Forces t 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life I is dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than the inorganic ; the latter must be explained from the former ; that which is dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical inter- pretation, which looks on life merely as a chemical phe- nomenon. The dead, mechanical and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life ; to them there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from " universal nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling thus recognizes a threefold nature : organized, inorganic, and universal organ- izing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital • force, so in all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the contending parties by means of mediating solutions. Thus, in the question of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of Franklin nor on that of his opponents ; in regard to the problem of light, endeavors to overcome the antithesis pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which qualities are to be explained.
 * Schelling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism, since it posits