proceeds.  Whatever in the latter is perfect, rational, harmonious, and purposive is the work of the understanding; the irrational remainder, on the other hand, conflict and lawlessness, abortion, sickness and death, originates in the dark ground.  Each thing has two principles in it:  its self-will it receives from nature in God, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding, it is the instrument of the universal will.  In God the light and dark principles stand in indissoluble unity, in man they are separable.  The freedom of man’s will makes him independent of both principles; going over from truth to falsehood, he may strive to make his selfhood supreme and to reduce the spiritual in him to the level of a means, or—­with divine assistance—­continuing in the center, he may endeavor to subordinate the particular will to the will of love.  Good consists in overcoming resistance, for in every case a thing can be revealed only through its opposite.  If man yields to temptation it is his own guilty choice.  Evil is not merely defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood breaking away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the universal will.  The possibility of a separation of the two wills lies in the divine ground (it is “permitted” in order that by overmastering the self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is the free act of the creature.  Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion:  Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates himself in the first creation, i.e., from eternity, and is responsible for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that free primal act.

[Footnote 1:  K. Ad.  Eschenmayer was originally a physician, then, 1811-36, professor of philosophy in Tuebingen, and died in 1852 at Kirchheim unter Teck.]

As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the two original grounds of things do battle with one another.  The golden age of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the omnipotence of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the spiritual light was born in personal form.  The subsequent conflict of good against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything subordinated to spirit, and thus the complete identity of the ground of existence and the existing God be brought about.