Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Schelling recognizes another, original unity of the two.  The not yet unfolded unity of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms indifference or groundlessness; the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega) is called identity or spirit.  In the former the contraries are not yet present; in the latter they are present no longer.  The groundless divides into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and understanding, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby the absolute develop into the personal God.  In this way Schelling endeavors to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism and pantheism, and to remove the difficulties which arise for pantheism from the fact of evil, as well as from the concepts of personality and of freedom.

In the two moments of the absolute (nature in God—­personal spirit) we recognize at once the antithesis of the real and ideal which was given in the philosophy of identity.  The chief difference between the mystical period and the preceding one consists in the fact that the absolute itself is now made to develop (from indifference to identity, from the neither-nor to the as-well-as of the antithesis), and that there is conceded to the sense-world a reality which is more than apparent, more than merely present for imagination.  That which facilitated this rapid, almost unceasing change of position for Schelling, and which at the same time concealed the fact from him, was, above all, the ambiguous and variable meaning of his leading concepts.  The “objective,” for example, now signifies unconscious being, becoming, and production, now represented reality, now the real, in so far as it is not represented, but only is.  “God” sometimes means the whole absolute, sometimes only the infinite, spiritual moment in the absolute.  Scarcely a single term is sharply defined, much less consistently used in a single meaning.

%3b.  Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation.%

Once again Schelling is ready with a new statement of the problem.  Philosophy is the science of the existent.  In this, however, a distinction is to be made between the what (quid sit) and the that (quod sit), or between essence and existence.  The apprehension of the essence, of the concept, is the work of reason, but this does not go as far as actual being.  Rational philosophy cognizes only the universal, the possible, the necessary truths (whose contradictory is unthinkable), but not the particular and factual.  This philosophy can only assert:  If anything exists it must conform to these laws; existence is not given with the what.  Hegel has ignored this distinction between the logical and the actual, has confused the rational and the real.  Even the system of identity was merely rational, i.e., negative, philosophy, to which there must be added, as a second part, a positive or existential philosophy, which does not, like the former, rise to the highest principle, to God, but starts from this supreme Idea and shows its actuality.