Mind and nature will gradually be blended into a harmo nious and living unity. The idea will become more and more real; reality will become more and more ideal. In other words: the absolute, which is the identity of the ideal and the real, will manifest and realize itself more and more.

However, as history is developed in time, and as time has no limits, history necessarily consists in infinite progress, and the realized absolute remains an ideal which cannot be definitively and completely realized. Hence if the ego were merely theoretical and practical, it could never realize the absolute; for, reflection as well as action is necessarily subject to the law of the dualism of subject and object, of the ideal and the real. Thought, it is true, can and must rise beyond reflection and its dualism; through the intellectual intuition1 we deny the dualism of the ideal and the real, we affirm that the ego and the non-ego spring from a higher unity in which all antitheses are blended; we rise, in a measure, beyond personal thought and ourselves; we iden tify ourselves with impersonal reason, which becomes objectified in the world and is personified in the ego. In a word, we partially return into the absolute whence we came.

But even this intuition cannot completely free itself from the law of opposition; consequently it is still a polarity, forming, on the one hand, a perceiving subject, on the other, an object perceived from without. The ego is on one side, God on the other; the dualism continues; the absolute is not a reality possessed or assimilated by the mind. The mind does not attain or realize the absolute, either as intelligence or action, but as the feeling of the beautiful in nature and in art.2 Art, religion, and revelation are one and the same thing, superior even to philosophy. Philosophy conceives God; art is God. Knowledge is the ideal presence, art the real presence of the Deity.3

1 Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, and the Mystics.
"Kant.

Neo-Platonism.

2. Schelling's "positive" philosophy, inaugurated in 1809 by the dissertation on human freedom, accentuates the mystical element contained in the foregoing sentences. Under the influence of Böhme, the philosopher becomes a theosophist; the pantheist, a monotheist. He insists on the reality of the divine idea, on the personality of God, on the cardinal importance of the Trinity. However, when we peer beneath the strange forms enveloping his romanticism, we find that there is less change in the essence of his thought than one would suppose: this essence is monism, a form of monism, however, which, under the influence of Böhme, is clearly defined as voluntarism.1 The absolute, the absolute indifference or identity, of "negative" philosophy exists, but it now receives the name applied to it by the Saxon theosophist: primitive will (ungründlicher Wille). The foundation or first principle of the divine being, and of all being, is not thought or reason, but will striving for being and individual and personal existence, or the desireto-be. Before being (ex-istere), every being, God included, desires to be. This desire or unconscious will precedes all intelligence and all conscious will. For God, the evolution by which he realizes himself, personifies himself, or makes himself God, is eternal, and the stages through which this evolution passes (the persons or hypostases of the Trinity) are merged into each other; but they are distinguished

1 The voluntaristic conception is, it is true, already found in the Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre, published by Schelling in the Philosophisches Journal (1796 and 1797). as well as in numerous passages in Fichte, whose philosophy is entirely impregnated with it. But he clearly and consciously affirms the prin ciple in his treatise on liberty: Es giebt in der letzten und höchsten Instanz gar kein anderes Sein als Wollen. Wollen ist Ursein, und auf dieses allein passen alle Prädikate desselben: Grundlosigkeit, Ewigkeit, Unabhängigkeit von der Zeit, Selbstbejahung. Die ganze Philosophie strebt nut dahin, diesen höchsten Ausdruck zu finden. (Works, first series, vol. VII p. 350.)

from each other in the human consciousness, appearing successively and forming stages in the religious development of humanity. The evil in the world has its source, not in God considered as a person, but in what precedes his personality, in that which, in God, is not God himself, i. e., in the desiderium essendi which we have just recognized as the first cause of all things, and which Schelling does not hesitate to call the divine egoism. In God, this principle is eternally merged in his love; in man, it becomes an independent principle and the source of moral evil. But however great the latter may be, it serves the purposes of the absolute, no less than the good.

We shall not here consider the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which we have set forth in another work,1 and which interests the historian of religion rather than the historian of philosophy. Our main purpose was to outline the contents of the principal treatises written by Schelling from 1795 to 1809, and to elucidate: (1) his masterly critique of Fichte's egoism (Ichlehre); (2) his conception of the absolute as will, the common ground of the object and subject (Kant), of the ego and non-ego (Fichte), of thought and extension (Spinoza); (3) his philosophy of nature, which, though abandoned by positive science, produced such naturalists as Burdach, Oken, Carus, Oersted, Steffens, G. H. Schubert, and, by carrying speculation into a field from which ideological investigations had banished it, prepared the way for the fusion of metaphysics and science, which we are now endeavoring to bring about; (4) his philosophy of history, a happy prelude to Hegel's philosophy of mind.

The philosophy of Schelling, the influence of which was partially counteracted and obscured by the Hegelian

1 Examen critique de la philosophie religieuse de Schelling, Strasburg 1886

2

school,1 really consists of two very distinct systems, which are connected by a common principle: according to the first, which forms its starting-point, thought precedes being (idealism); according to the second, (potential) being is the antecedent of thought (realism). Under the influence of the former, he speaks of intellectual intuition and conceives his Transcendental philosophie, while the latter exalts experience and the philosophy of nature. The one leads to Hegel and the a priori construction of the universe and of history, the other, to Schopenhauer and contemporaneous empiricism.

§ 66. Hegel 3

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HEGEL was born at Stuttgart, 1770, and died as a professor in the University of Berlin,

1 Nevertheless, this influence was considerable. Even omitting the disciples properly so-called, we can detect it in most of the thinkers mentioned in § 71. Observe that the most celebrated among contemporaneous German philosophers, Eduard von Hartmann, is as much a disciple of Schelling as of Schopenhauer, and that the most original of our French metaphysicians, Charles Secrétan, is an avowed adherent of the "positive philosophy."

2 We noticed the same dualism in Plotinus.

Complete works, 19 vols. and supplement, containing Hegel's biography by K. Rosenkranz, Berlin, 1832-44. The most important works of Hegel have been translated into French by A. Véra, professor at Naples, who has also written an Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel, 2d ed., Paris, 1864. Consult also: [K. Rosenkranz, Kritische Erläu terungen des hegelschen Systems, Königsberg, 1840; H. Ulrici, Princip und Methode der hegelschen Philosophie, Berlin, 1843; R. Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit, Berlin, 1857]; P. Janet, Etudes sur la dialectique dans Platon et dans Hegel, Paris, 1860; [Foucher de Careil, Hegel et Schopenhauer, Paris, 1862]; E. Schérer, Hegel et l'hégélianisme (in his Mélanges d'histoire religieuse, 2d ed., Paris, 1865); J. H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel. The Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter, 2 vols., London, 1865; [K. Köstlin, Hegel, Tübingen, 1870; E. Caird, Hegel (Blackwood's Phil. Classics), London, 1883; J. S. Kedney, Hegel's Esthetics (Griggs's Series), Chicago, 1885; G. S. Morris, Hegel's Phi

1831. Like his friend Schelling, he attended the theological seminary at Tübingen. Jena, where he renewed and then dissolved the friendship with his fellow-countryman, who was five years his junior, Nuremberg, where he had charge of the Gymnasium, Heidelberg, and the Prussian capital, mark the different stages in his academic career. We mention the following works: (1) Phänomenologie des Geistes1 (1807); (2) Wissenschaft der Logik,2 in three volumes (1812-1816); (3) Encyclopedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 3 (1817); (4) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821); also, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Vorlesungen über die Esthetik, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, published after his death.

losophy of the State and of History (id.), 1887; W. T. Harris, Hegel's Logic (il.), 1890; A. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 2d ed., Edinburgh and London, 1893; W. Wallace, Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy and especially of his Logic, 2d ed., Clarendon Press, 1891. See also the works on Post-Kantian philosophy, p. 434, note 1. - TR.]

1 [Translation of chs. 1, 2, and 3 in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. II.TR.]

2 [Vol. II., tr. by W. T. Harris. See also Stirling, cited p. 496, note 3.]

3 [W. Wallace, The Logic of Hegel. Translated from the Encyclo Iedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 2d ed., Oxford, 1892; same trans lator, Philosophy of Mind, id., 1894. — TR.]

[Selections from this work translated by J. M. Sterrett, under the title, The Ethics of Hegel (in the Ethical Series), Boston, 1893. - TR.] [Philosophy of History, tr. by J. Sibree, Bohn's Library, 1860. —

5

TR.]

6 [Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, tr. by B. Bosanquet, London, 1886; Phil. of Art, abridged tr. by W. Hastie; tr. of second part by W. Bryant in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, V.-VII., XI-XIII. -TR.]

7

[Part. tr. in Journal of Spec. Phil., vols. XV.-XXI. — TR.]

8 [History of Philosophy, tr. by E. S. Haldane, 3 vols, London 1892 ff.; parts tr. in Journal of Spec. Phil., vols. IV., V., XIII., XX. -TR.]