At first Schelling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the finite:  absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the identity.  In this, as the “form” of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not absolutely one, as they are in the being or “essence” of the absolute, but ideally (potentially) opposed, though one realiter.  Later he does away with this distinction also, as existing for reflection alone, not for rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concerning the simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or the identity of the identity, in which fanciful description the dialogue Bruno pours itself forth.  A further alteration is brought in by characterizing the absolute as the identity of the finite and the infinite, and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the ideal or knowing.  With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation of the Trinity akin to Lessing’s.  In the absolute or eternal the finite and the infinite are alike absolute.  God the Father is the eternal, or the unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in God (before the falling away); the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite into the eternal.

In the construction of the real series Schelling proceeds still more schematically and analogically than in the Naturphilosophie of the first period, the contents of which are here essentially reproduced.  With this is closely connected his endeavor, in correspondence with the principles of the theory of identity, to show in every phenomenon the operation of all three moments of the absolute.  In each natural product all three “potencies” or stages, gravity A(^1), light A(^2), and organization A(^3), are present, only in subordination to one of their number.  Since the third potency is never lacking, all is organic; that which appears to us as inorganic matter is only the residuum left over from organization, that which could become neither plant nor animal.  New here is the cohesion-series of Steffens (the phenomenon of magnetism), in which nitrogen forms the south pole, carbon the north pole, and iron the point of indifference, while oxygen, hydrogen, and water represent the east pole, west pole, and indifference point in electrical polarity.  In the organic world plants represent the carbon pole, animals the nitrogen pole; the former is the north pole, the latter the south.  Moreover, the points of indifference reappear:  the plant corresponds to water, the animal to iron.  Schelling was far outdone in fantastic analogies of this kind by his pupils, especially by Oken, who in his Sketch of the Philosophy of Nature, 1805, compares the sense of hearing, for example, to the parabola, to a metal, to a bone, to the bird, to the mouse, and