to the horse.  As nature was the imaging of the infinite (unity or essence) into the finite (plurality or form), so spirit is the taking up of the finite into the infinite.  In the spiritual realm also all three divine original potencies are every, where active, though in such a way that one is dominant.  In intuition (sensation, consciousness, intuition, each in turn thrice divided) the infinite and the eternal are subordinated to the finite; in thought or understanding (concept, judgment, inference, each in three kinds) the finite and the eternal are subordinated to the infinite; in reason (which comprehends all under the form of the absolute) the finite and the infinite are subordinated to the eternal.  Intuition is finite cognition, thought infinite cognition, reason eternal cognition.  The forms of the understanding do not suffice for the knowledge of reason; common logic with its law of contradiction has no binding authority for speculation, which starts with the equalization of opposites.  In the Aphorisms by way of Introduction science, religion, and art figure as stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real all—­matter, motion, and organization.  Nature culminates in man, history in the state.  Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the return of the absolute to itself.

Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia, i.e., his Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, is the presupposition of all particular knowledge.  The function of universities is to maintain intact the connection between particular knowledge and absolute knowledge.  The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in the absolute:  Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite; History and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula.  There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty, which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable.  The two lectures on theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important.  There are two forms of religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of providence begins.  In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism.  The speculative kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the Indian sages; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in time, but as eternal.  It has been a hindrance to the development of Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents.