Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/216

192 to be a first statement, so their author declared, of the two great and seemingly opposed aspects of philosophy. The outer world was to be shown as after all the manifestation of spirit; the inner world of the self was to be exhibited as inevitably expressing itself in relation to an outer, a natural order. The fundamental thought of the whole doctrine was in substance this: Fichte had declared that it is the self-assertion of the absolute self, the free choice of the true Ego, that is the source of all truth. When I as knower recognize a truth, that is because I as doer have first made this truth. This view Schelling also accepts. But now, as one sees, a conscious self is at once the doer of its present act, and the contemplator of the results of its past acts. As I look out on the world of nature, I see crystallized before me the expression of what my true and absolute self has already been doing. The same activity that this present consciousness exemplifies for me has been there from eternity, and nature is the concrete embodiment to the onlooker of the results of his own eternal deeds. Nature then is not merely, as Fichte had said, my duty made manifest to my senses; it is also my timelessly past spiritual life, — not of course my finite or individual and private past life, but the life of my deeper self, of the one and absolute divine spirit. This autobiography of spirit, manifest to our eyes, is then the natural order. On the other hand, the inner life as such is capable of a philosophical treatment; for this is, as it were, not the record of the spirit's past, but the fullness of the spirit’s conscious actuality We have thus a twofold philosophy to be wrought out, and Schelling in 1799 and 1800 publishes his two sketches as though in topic, if not in execution, they completely covered the ground. But In 1801 appeared a new treatise, called by Schelling simply “Exposition of my System of Philosophy,” and here the doctrine seems to take a new form, which readers could only with great difficulty reconcile with what had