Like most philosophers of note, Schelling reckons with the various tendencies of his times.  With idealism he interprets the universe as identical in essence with what we find in our innermost selves; it is at bottom a living dynamic process.  If that is so, nature cannot be a merely externalized obstacle for the ego, nor a dead static spatial mechanical system; as the expression of an active spiritual principle there must be reason and purpose in it.  But reason is not identified by Schelling with self-conscious intelligence, for with the faith-philosophies and Romanticism he takes it in a wider sense; in physical and organic nature it is a slumbering reason, an unconscious, instinctive, purposive force similar to the Leibnizian monad, Schopenhauer’s will, and Bergson’s elan vital.  In this way the dualism between mechanism and teleology is reconciled.  Nature is a teleological order, an evolution from the unconscious to the conscious; in man, the highest stage and the climax of history, nature becomes self-conscious.  With this organic conception both Romanticists and many natural scientists of the age were in practical agreement; it was the view that had always appealed to Goethe—­and Herder before him—­and it gained for Schelling a large following.  In his earlier system he regarded nature as a lower stage in the evolution of reason and sought to answer the problems:  How does Nature become Consciousness or Ego? the problem of the Philosophy of Nature; and, How does Consciousness or the Ego become Nature? the problem of Transcendental Idealism.  In his philosophy of identity, nature and mind are conceived as two different aspects of one and the same principle, which is both mind and nature, subject and object, ego and non-ego.  All things are identical in essence but differentiated in the course of evolution.  It was not inconsistent with these tenets that Schelling sought, in his last period, to discover the meaning of universal history in the obscure beginnings of mythology and revelation rather than in the lucid regions of an advanced civilization.

With the opponents of rationalism Schelling agrees that we cannot reach the inner meaning of reality, “the living, moving element in nature,” through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition.  “What is described in concepts,” he tells us, “is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived.  The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is.  Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity.”  Schelling, who is a poet as well as a philosopher, comes to regard this intuition or inner vision as an artistic intuition.  In the products of art, subject and object, the ideal and the real, mind and nature, form (or purpose) and matter, are one; here the harmony aimed at by philosophy lies before our very eyes,