Fichte and Schelling by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the latter the ego, from nature.  It is rather true that with them both nature and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature.  In the Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the natura naturata appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing intelligence.  In the unconscious products of nature, nature’s aim to reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds.  Nature is the embryonic life of spirit.  Nature and spirit are essentially identical:  “That which is posited out of consciousness is in its essence the same as that which is posited in consciousness also.”  Therefore “the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower.”  Nature the preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real development-series—­these are ideas from Herder which Schelling introduces into the transcendental philosophy.  The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the Naturphilosophie by Herder’s physicism.

“Nature is a priori” (everything individual in it is pre-determined by the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature can be deduced from the concept of nature.  The philosopher creates nature anew, he constructs it.  Speculative physics considers nature as subject, becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being, product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing reflection, an intuition directed to the whole.  To this productive nature, as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities, one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the universal law of polarity.  The absolute productivity strives toward an infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no product exists.  At definite points a check must be given it in order that something knowable may arise.  Thus every product in nature is the result of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one.  The endlessness of the creative activity manifests itself in various ways:  in the striving for development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of products.  Nature’s creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every product.  Qualities are points of arrest in the