If, finally, we compare Schelling’s system of identity with its model, the system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent.  Although both thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal manifestations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit thought in dependence on extension (the soul represents what the body is), while in Schelling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spirit is still potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute identity than the organism, although, principiantly considered, the greatest possible approximation to the equilibrium of the real and the ideal is as much attained in the one as in the other).  The second difference lies in the fact that the idea of development is entirely lacking in Spinoza, while in Schelling it is everywhere dominant.  It reminds one of Lessing and Herder, who also attempted to combine Spinozistic and Leibnitzian elements.

%3a.  Doctrine of Freedom.%

The system of identity had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the real world of absolute identity and the imagined world of differentiated and changeable individual things; it had traced back the latter to the former as its ground, but had not deduced it from the former.  Whence, then, the imagination which, instead of the unchangeable unity, shows us the changing manifold?  Whence the imperfections of the finite, whence evil?  The pantheism of Spinoza is inseparably connected with determinism, which denies evil without explaining it.  Evil and finitude demand explanation, not denial, and this without the abandonment of pantheism.  But explanation by what?  By the absolute, for besides the absolute there is naught.  How, then, must the pantheistic doctrine of the absolute be transformed in order that the fact of evil and the separate existence of the finite may become comprehensible?  To this task are devoted the Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (Philosophical Works, vol. i., 1809, with which should be compared the Memorial of Jacobi, 1812, and the Answer to Eschenmayer, 1813).

As early as in the Bruno, the problem occasionally emerges why matters do not rest with the original infinite unity of the absolute, why the finite breaks away from the identical primal ground.  The possibility of the separation, it is answered, lies in the fact that the finite is like the infinite realiter, and yet, ideally, is different from it; the actuality of the coming forth, however, lies in the non-deducible self-will of the finite.  Then after Eschenmayer[1] (Philosophy in its Transition to Not-philosophy, 1803) had characterized the procession of the Ideas out of the Godhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy must yield to faith, Schelling, in the essay Religion and Philosophy, 1804, goes more deeply into the problem.  The origin of the sense-world is conceivable only as a breaking