THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING.
Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where,
besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly
of the springs of thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes
and the fears of the struggle republican France waged against the
German powers, and had seen that Kantian criticism contained within
it a fire which would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology.
Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed through his college
career in a very creditable but by no means brilliant way. Among his
fellows he had gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective
mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior, breathed a deep
impassioned zeal for that higher life of which the nobler spirits among
the young then, as now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling,
singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art, and the
receptivity of genius to catch and string together the theories
that rose to the top in science and letters, had already made his
mark as a philosophic writer, while his senior compatriot, leading
the inconspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up and
widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in metaphysics trod the
same lines as Fichte; but in 1797 (when he was aged 22) appeared his
_Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature._ A year later he was lecturing
at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and with Fichte,
who, however, soon quitted the place. In 1800 appeared the _System of
Transcendental Idealism_, and in 1801 the _Exposition of my System_;
followed in 1802 by _Bruno_, and in 1803 by the _Lectures on University
Studies._ Brief periods of academic teaching at Würzburg, Erlangen, and
Munich, and after 1841 at Berlin, broke the silence which set in after
his _Inquiries into the nature of human liberty_ in 1809; but little
certain was known to the outside public of the final standpoint till
the publication of his collected works (1856-61).
An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon they historian as he surveys
Schelling's career. Seldom had a thinker's life begun with better
promise, and more distinguished performance; seldom had a nobler
inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided and propelled
the intellectual interest; seldom had expectation of greater things
yet to come followed a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling.
On one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the results of
scientific discovery, at least in its more suggestive advances: on the
other, a mastery of words and style which fitted him to hold his own
amongst the literary leaders; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed to
be religious, with the movement which sought _lucem ex Oriente_, and
wisdom from the treasures of the world's purer youth. And yet--in the
main--the net result, oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a
great thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the remark
that even books and thinkers have their fates, and that some momentary
forgetfulness let the tide slip unused. But it is possible to be less
oracularly-obscure: and without detracting from the splendid faculty
and great achievement of Schelling to note some of the causes of his
lapse into a mere episode.
In the first place, though his conception is of a system, his
performance is only a succession of fragments. The nearest approach
to an encyclopaedic exposition of his ideas is found in his popular
_Lectures on the Studies of University._ More than once he starts
on the task of exposition, but lets it break off about the middle.
Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme of thought
have slightly altered, and not merely does his philosophy profess
at first to present two distinct sides, but these two sides of the
shield vary. Thirdly, the interest in scientific novelties, always
disposed to seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more
than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes on to fasten too
greedily on the miraculous and mysterious night-side of nature, on
magic powers and mystic discernments--a path which descends to the
abyss of a 'positive,' i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy. The
matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in Bavaria, and the
Protestant theologian Paulus, once a friend, but latterly his bitterest
foe) regard him as a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval
obscurantism so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art
renders him suspected: for there is an old quarrel between philosophy
and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom is jealous of her gipsy rival.
Ill-advised indications of a sense of lofty superiority to the average
teacher increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents. Nor is
it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to suggest that his first
wife, Caroline, with all her wonderful attractions of intellect and
character, and notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in
encouragement and counsel, was too clever and too critical not to sow
many jealousies, and to add through the female line to the ranks of
those with whom he stood suspect.
But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was a certain
excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn attacks down by an abnormal
subjectivity which would fain reform the surroundings wherever he
went. Schelling stood more apart--animated by an immense curiosity,
a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but
withal he seemed not to have his heart, deeply set and pledged to
a distinctively human interest. His first love is the Romance in
nature; and when he turns to history it is by preference to ages far
remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it achieve its work by
the instrumentality of Art. Religion seems to culminate for him in
a mythology. Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat
of a disease--whence philosophy is to carry us--almost magically if
possible--to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an
instrument towards a great end--and that end a godlike, even if you
like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be
easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy,
in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy--at least as
Hegel understood it--is merely neither: but the life, which never
can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. And so Schelling could
not earn the confidence which only goes to those who are felt to be
fellow-fighters with those they lead.
With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main current of
philosophy, of streams of idea and research which had already
exercised a stimulative effect on the tone and products of the higher
literature of Germany. As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the
English and Scotch 'empiricists' shake him out of his 'rationalist'
dogmatism) Lessing--in a couple of pages _On the reality of things
outside God_--threw doubts on the tenability of the ordinary deistic
arrangement of his day, which set God _there_ and man and his
surroundings _here,_ each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly
enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of Spinoza, and
Spinoza by the light of Leibniz: and, if he emphasised the absolute
right to the completest individual self-development on one hand, he no
less declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is insulated,
nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences.'
'I thank the Creator that I must,--must the best,' he adds (1774). Of
his conversations on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already
spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either decried, or--what is
worse--misunderstood, by the established masters of instruction, they
were welcomed by a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more
appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of thought.
Amongst these one of the most interesting and influential was Herder.
Herder, who had been amongst Kant's students in 1763, and who has
expressed his admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed-by
to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the Kantian system.
The two men were mentally and morally of different types: and in
Herder's case, a sense of injury, in the end, positively blinded
him to the meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had
decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the Kantian system
laboured throughout from the fault of a dead logical formalism and
abstractness: it inhabited a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the
fresh breath of nature and the growing life of history, and from the
eternal spirit of divine truth: it undermined (so his experience at
Weimar[1] indicated) the traditional faith, and inspired its 'adepts'
with a revolutionary superciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried
logicality, its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to his
poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-historical
soul. Man--in his concrete completeness, in his physical surroundings
and his corporeal structure, in his social organisation, in his
literary and artistic life, above all in his poetry and traditions of
religion--was the theme of his studies; and he looked with distrust on
every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the total unity of humanity
by a criticism first of this, and then a criticism of that side of
it, carried on separately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his;
and the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth around the
figures of that visionary world hangs with a charm and a confusion
around the ultimate horizon of Herder's ideas.
In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an essay (published 1778)
for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy on the subject of 'Sensation
and Cognition in the human Soul.' Its fundamental points are that
'no psychology is possible, which is not at every step a distinct
physiology': that 'cognition and volition are only _one_ energy of the
soul': that 'all our thought has arisen out of and through sensation,
and in spite of all distillation still contains copious traces of
it': that there are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine
power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing sensation,--'one
energy, and elasticity of the soul, which reaches its height through
the medium of language.' 'What is material, what non-material in
man, I know not,' he says; 'but I am in the faith that nature has not
fastened iron plates between them,' 'Man is a slave of mechanism (but
a mechanism disguised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and
fancies himself free,' 'Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new phase of
expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity of
our will': they vary directly with each other: and 'love therefore is
the highest reason'--a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we will
not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly more divine Spinoza,
whose philosophy and ethics turn wholly upon this axis.'
Herder's great work, however,--which, side by side with Lessing's
_Education of the Human Race,_ and with Kant's _Idea for a Universal
History_, helped to constitute that conception of history, as
philosophy in concrete form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and
Hegel,--was the _Ideas for a Philosophy of History._ It is the pendant
and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with which it is nearly
contemporaneous (1784-91). Even in history Kant emphasises the work of
intelligence, of reason: and puts the intelligently-organised state--if
possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be transformed into
merely stimulating competition,--as the final triumph of the reason.
To Herder, while on the one hand the nature-basis is all-essential,
and must form the foundation of any genetic explanation of spiritual
phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents itself rather as a free
development of the many-sided individual--a development tempered by
the association of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's
view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling presuppositions
works out the end of culture: Herder, on the contrary, allows himself
to introduce--but only in and from the dim background--a supernatural
aid to actualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature.
Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead appears, and
a deified humanity looms ahead as the consummation of the process
of evolution, the development between these two extreme poles is
homogeneous and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout:
'Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind.' Man is from the
first endowed with tendencies which, through the medium of society
and tradition, carry him on to the double end, so hard to combine,
of 'humanity and happiness,' 'humanity and religion.' But, for
this training of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural
endowment of the body: and Herder can go so far as to say that 'in
order to delineate the duties of man, we need only delineate his
form.' Developing under the influence of cosmic and geographical
conditions, and formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type
as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation, a definitely
proportioned mechanism, which is his distinctive and permanent specific
character. General identity of plan and condition prevails for man
and animals; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian inference which
interprets the graduated diversity of type as indicating that man is
the phase reached _pro tempore_ in the gradual slide along which the
continuous change of environment carries the unstable types which
earlier environments have helped to form. For Herder's conception of
nature there are fixed differences beyond which research cannot go; and
we shall see that both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation.
Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after
Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little
book _God_ (1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's
attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture
of Spinozism, one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an
interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with
the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand--but it was also
an audacious--vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with
a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the
other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce
the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain
hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly
called itself _amor erga rem infinitam et aeternam._ 'Spinoza,' says
Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he
translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by
teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms like
_substance_, _mode, cause_, are inadequate to interpret the intensity
of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which
rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to
prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel[2].
It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins
his first characteristic work,--the _Ideas towards a philosophy of
Nature._ In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental
standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of
the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely
passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is
pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which
all separate existence, body or mind, is only a _modus_, it is taken
by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being.
Every monad--and the human soul is the typical monad--is at once finite
and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But--whether as
underlying substance, or as unity of reality--both hold the cardinal
doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity
and unification--the identity--of what outside it appears as two
sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise,
therefore--or to see things in the absolute--is (not as Hegel's
malicious joke puts it[3], to look at them 'in the night when all cows
are dark,'--but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from
the identity of the _Spirit_ within us with the _Nature_ without us.
Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the
original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis)
of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed
absolute thesis,--an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is
the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of
knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited
by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be
impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity,
or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of
overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute
Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such
is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject
and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to
the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The
'_I_' is opposed to the _'Thee,'_ and the '_Them,_' and the 'It.' The
'thing'--or non-ego--is depreciated as compared with the thinker and
willer. It is postulated _ad majorem gloriam_ of the Ego: in order that
I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to
make out of it. It _is_ nothing but what it _will be_--or will be if
I do what I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is
left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The
Absolute is not yet:--it is only the forecast of a postulated result.
'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism,
then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let
us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and
begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature
and Spirit. Nature--not Matter--is the one side: Mind or Spirit the
other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy--a
philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the
other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper
continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work.
But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole
philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for
the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy
of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind
and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.[4]
[Footnote 1: He held posts of large general superintendence over church
and school affairs at Weimar.]
[Footnote 2: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.]
[Footnote 3: Hegel, _Werke_, ii. 13.]
[Footnote 4: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.]