The leading motive in Schelling’s thinking is an unusually powerful fancy, which gives to his philosophy a lively, stimulating, and attractive character, without making it to a like degree logically satisfactory.  If the systems of Fichte and Hegel, which in their content are closely related to Schelling’s, impress us by their logical severity, Schelling chains us by his lively intuition and his suggestive power of feeling his way into the inner nature of things.  With him analogies outweigh reasons; he is more concerned about the rich content of concepts than about their sharp definition; and in the endeavor to show the unity of the universe, both in the great and in the little, especially to show the unity of nature and spirit, he dwells longer on the relationship of objects than on their antitheses, which he is glad to reduce to mere quantitative and temporary differences.  He adds to this an astonishing mobility of thought, in virtue of which every offered suggestion is at once seized and worked into his own system, though in this the previous standpoint is unconsciously exchanged for a somewhat altered one.  Schelling’s philosophy is, therefore, in a continual state of flux, nearly every work shows it in a new form, and it is always ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition.  Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were already familiar to Schelling as a pupil at Tuebingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who exerted a transforming influence on his system, to be followed later by Neoplatonism and Boehme’s mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse with his contemporaries Kielmeyer, Steffens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others.  Omitting his early adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished in Schelling’s thinking.  The first period (1797-1800) includes the epoch-making feat of his youth, the philosophy of nature, and, as an equally legitimate second part of his system, the philosophy of spirit or transcendental philosophy.  The latter is a supplementary recasting of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, while in the former Schelling follows Kant and Herder.  The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate parts, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, and as a fundamental discipline, a science of the absolute, the philosophy of identity, which may be characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean basis.  Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on this form of Schelling’s philosophy.  With the year 1809, after the signs of a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its third, the theosophical, period, the period of the positive philosophy, in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage.  The former is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob Boehme; the latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to Aristotle