Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/482

 46o SCHELLING. the Aphorisms hy way of Introduction science, religion, and art figure as stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real all — matter, motion, and organiza- tion. Nature culminates in man, history in the state. Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the return of the absolute to itself. Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia, t. ^., his Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, is the presupposition of all particular knowledge. The function of universities is to maintain intact the con- nection between particular knowledge and absolute knowl- edge. The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in the absolute : Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite ; History and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula. There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty, which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable. The two lectures on theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important. There are two forms of religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of providence begins. In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism. The specula- tive kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the Indian sages ; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in time, but as eternal. It has been a hindrance to the development of Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents. If, finally, we compare Schelling's system of identity with its model, the system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent. Although both thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal mani- festations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit thought in dependence on extension (the soul