away, a spring, a falling away, which consists in the soul’s grasping itself in its selfhood, in its subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus ceasing to be in God.  The procession of the world from the infinite is a free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary.  The counterpart of this attainment of independence on the part of things or creation is history as the return of the world to its source.  They are related to each other as the fall to redemption.  Both the dismission of the world and its reception back, together with the intervening development, are, however, events needed by God himself in order to become actual God:  He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the Middle Ages:  if God is to give a complete revelation of himself he must make known his grace; and this presupposes sin.  As the occasion of divine grace, the fall is a happy, saving fault; without it God could not have revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.) Schelling’s study of Jacob Boehme, to which he was led by Baader, essentially contributed to the concentration of his thought on this point. The Exposition of the True Relation, etc., already distinctly betrays the influence of this mystic.  In correspondence with Boehme’s doctrine that God is living God only through his inclusion of negation in himself, it is here maintained:  A being can manifest itself only when it is not merely one, but has another, an opposition (the many), in itself, whereby it is revealed to itself as unity.  With the addition of certain Kantian ideas, in particular the idea of transcendental freedom and the intelligible character, Schelling’s theosophy now assumes the following form: 

The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless God of Spinoza is to assume something in God which is not God himself, to distinguish between God as existent and that which is merely the ground of his existence or “nature in God.”  In God also the perfect proceeds from the imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself.  The actual, perfect God, who is intelligence, wisdom, goodness, is preceded by something which is merely the possibility of all this, an obscure, unconscious impulse toward self-representation.  For in the last analysis there is no being but willing; to willing alone belong the predicates of the primal being, groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation.  This “ground of existence” is an obscure “longing” to give birth to self, an unconscious impulse to become conscious; the goal of this longing is the “understanding,” the Logos, the Word, wherein God becomes revealed to self.  By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its matter and instrument, God becomes actual God, becomes spirit and love.  The operation of the light understanding on the dark nature-will consists in a separation of forces, whence the visible world