and the Gnostics.  In the first period the absolute for Schelling is creative nature; in the second, the identity of opposites; in the third it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of the contraries to their overcoming.  In neither of these advances is it Schelling’s intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each case only to add a supplement.  That which has hitherto been the whole is retained as a part.  The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though with a reversed procedure; then the theory of identity assumes a place above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to the previous negative (rational) philosophy.

%1a.  Philosophy of Nature.%

Schelling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science, the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise?  They agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts, outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these actions.  Nature exists in order that the ego may develop.  But while Fichte correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego.  Nature is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order, striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further, working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical activity:  but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself.  Spirit develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence.  By transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject, Schelling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne.  The threefold division, “infinite original activity—­nature or object—­individual ego or subject,” remains as in Fichte, only that the first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature, natura naturans.  Schelling’s aim is to show how from the object a subject arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a representer, from nature an ego.  He could only hope to solve this problem if he conceived natural objects—­in the highest of which, man, he makes conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself—­as themselves the products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward consciousness.  For him also doing is more original than being.  It would not be exact, therefore, to define the difference between