Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/480

 458 SCHELLING. definite expression of the absolute, and to it as such the character of identity belongs, though in a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno's "monads"). The world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, identity and totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective ; everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always predominates. This Schelling terms quantitative difference : the phenom- ena of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the ideal, only that in the former there is a pre- ponderance of the real, in the latter a preponderance of the ideal. At first Schelling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the finite: absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the identity. In this, as the " form " of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not absolutely one, as they are in the being or " essence " of the absolute, but ideally (potentially) opposed, though one realiter. Later he does away with this distinc- tion also, as existing for reflection alone, not for rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concern- ing the simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or the identity of the identity, in which fanciful description the dialogue Bruno pours itself forth. A further alteration is brought in by characterizing the absolute as the identity of the finite and the infinite, and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the ideal or knowing. With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation of the Trinity akin to Lessing's. In the absolute or eternal the finite and the infinite are alike absolute. God the Father is the eternal, or the unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in God (before the falling away) ; the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite into the eternal. In the construction of the real series Schelling proceeds still more schematically and analogically than in the Naturphilosophie of the first period, the contents of which are here essentially reproduced. With this is closely con-