which operates with blind necessity.  The state, like law, is a product of the genus, and not of individuals.  The ideal of a cosmopolitan legal condition is the goal of history, in which caprice and conformity to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit.  History is the never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious and the unconscious) through human freedom.  We are co-authors in the historical world-drama, and invent our own parts.  Not until the third (the religious) period, in which he reveals himself as “providence,” will God be; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt as “fate,” and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears as the “plan of nature,” God is not, but is only becoming.

[Footnote 1:  With this transformation of the antithesis between knowledge and volition into a mere difference in degree, Schelling sinks back to the standpoint of Leibnitz.  In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and will, as also that between intellect and sensibility.  Schiller brings the contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic activity.  Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Schelling combines both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original identity.  Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect proceed from will.]

An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the third, the aesthetic, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes use of Kant’s theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic.  Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and practical action, the antithesis of subject and object, is removed; in which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united.  The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows the problem of philosophy, the identity of the real and the ideal, solved in sensuous appearance.  Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy; she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries.  Poesy and philosophy (the aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old mythology—­why should not this repeat itself in the future?

%2.  System of Identity.%

The assertion which had already been made in the first period that “nature and spirit are fundamentally the same,” is intensified in the second into the proposition, “The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the identity of the real and the ideal,” and in this form is elevated into a principle.  As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a basis for them, and in Schelling’s exposition of which several phases must be distinguished.[1]