Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/50

 to carry the confusion between reason and cause farther, nor could it lead to graver consequences than here. But this shows the importance of the subject of the present treatise.

In endeavouring to add a third step to the climax in question, Herr von Schelling has contributed a small after-piece to these errors, into which two mighty intellects of the past had fallen owing to insufficient clearness in thinking. If Descartes met the demands of the inexorable law of causality, which reduced his God to the last straits, by substituting a reason instead of the cause required, in order thus to set the matter at rest; and if Spinoza made a real cause out of this reason, i.e., causa sui, his God thereby becoming the world itself: Schelling now made reason and consequent separate in God himself. He thus gave the thing still greater consistency by elevating it to a real, substantial hypostasis of reason and consequent, and introducing us to something "in God, which is not himself, but his reason, as a primary reason, or rather reason beyond reason (abyss)." Hoc quidem vere palmarium est.—It is now known that Schelling had taken the whole fable from Jacob Böhme's "Full account of the terrestrial and celestial mystery; " but what appears to me to be less well known, is the source from which Jacob Böhme himself had taken it, and the real birth-place of this so-called abyss, wherefore I now take the liberty to mention it. It is the βυθός, i.e. abyssus, vorago, bottomless pit, reason beyond reason of the Valentinians (a heretical sect of the second century) which, in silence—co-essential with itself—engendered intelligence and the world, as Irenæus relates in the following terms: λέγουσι γάρ τινα είναι ἐν ἀοράτος, καὶ ἀκατονοομάστοις ύψώμασι τέλειον Αίῶνα προόντα τούτον δὲ καὶ προαρχήν, καὶ προπάτορα, καὶ βυθὸν καλοῦσιν.—