[Footnote 1:  The philosophy of identity is given in the following treatises:  Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature (both in the Jahrbuecher fuer Medizin), 1806.  Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine:  the additions to the second edition of the Ideas, 1803, and the Exposition, against Fichte, 1806.]

Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming.  The manifold and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and speculation proves them void.  While things appear particular to inadequate representation, the philosopher views them sub specie aeterni, in their per se, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas.  To construe things is to present them as they are in God.  But in God all things are one; in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to Hegel’s parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)

The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective.  Although amid the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not entirely lost:  each particular existence is a definite expression of the absolute, and to it as such the character of identity belongs, though in a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno’s “monads").  The world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, identity and totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective; everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always predominates.  This Schelling terms quantitative difference:  the phenomena of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the ideal, only that in the former there is a preponderance of the real, in the latter a preponderance of the ideal.