one universal force of nature; all nature is a connected development.  Because of the opposition in the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the law of duality everywhere rules.  To these two forces, however, still a third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation or measure of their connection.  This is the source of the threefold division of the Philosophy of Nature.  The magnet with its union of opposite polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.

With Fichte’s synthetic method and Herder’s naturalistic principles Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant’s dynamism (matter is a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves, because of the interaction between their members and the whole).  The three organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address On the Relations of the Organic Forces, 1793, excited great attention.  The concept of life is dominant in Schelling’s theory of nature.  The organic is more original than the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is dead must be considered as a product of departing life.  No less erroneous than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation, which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon.  The dead, mechanical and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing activities on which the vital process depends.  Life consists, that is, in the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the chemical process.  This constant disturbance proceeds from “universal nature,” which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul.  Schelling thus recognizes a threefold nature:  organized, inorganic, and universal organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital force, so in all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the contending parties by means of mediating solutions.  Thus, in the question of “single or double electricity,” he ranges himself neither on the side of Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light, endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton’s emanation theory and the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).