Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/215

191 his idealism conceives it, is the moral law. The infinite self longs for rational and active self-possession. Hence it differentiates itself into numerous forms, as the vine grows out into its own branches. These branchings of the one great vine of the spirit form our finite and essentially incomplete selves.

But for the romanticists, as we found, the centre of the world is not so much the moral law as the interest which every spirit has in a certain divine wealth of emotion and of experience. The world is the world of ideas; things exist because spirits experience them; and spirits experience because, as parts of the divinely complete life, it is their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in their self-realization as possible.

I.

Before we now pass directly to Hegel it is necessary to say yet a word of the more technical speculations of Schelling, of whom, in his character as romanticist, we heard something in the last lecture. Schelling’s development, as you already know, was very rapid; his writings were early voluminous. He was a man of mark and a professor at Jena by the time he had reached his twenty-third year. His systematic views during his youthful period seemed to his readers to alter with a dangerously magical ease and swiftness of transformation. He himself meanwhile denied, during the years up to 1809, that there was so far any significant change from the essential doctrines of his early works. He had added, he said, to what he at first taught. More truth had come to him; not a contradiction of former insight. But readers found it suspicious that each new book of Schelling’s seemed to supersede all his previous efforts. In 1797, he published his “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature.” During the next three years appeared his “System of Transcendental Idealism” and his “First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature.” These two latter works were