Chapter 6

[7]To give this interpretation of the larger Ego as Life and Blessedness is to assume that the teaching, e. g. of theAnweisung zum Seligen Leben,is the logical deepening of the earlier language about the Ego.

[8]Cf. the description of mind as 4 a bundle of impressions.'

[9]Especially given in the Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wiss. (Werke,i. 331). Of course Fichte goes through a corresponding 'deduction' of the emotional or moral nature. Schelling (System des transcend. Idealismus) works out the 'deduction' still more at length.

[10]Fichte,Werke, i. 286.

[11]Ibid. ii. 261.

[12]It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the state of affairs alluded to, which has its literary memorials in F. Schlegel'sLucinde, and in the warm defense of that book by Scheiermacher, was only a passing experiment in which a high-strung idealism amid a lax society sought for truth at all costs and dared a noble lie.

[13]In theGeschlossener Handelstaat(of 1800), the 'classical' document of characteristic German Socialism in its earlier and idealist phase.

Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where, besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly of the springs of thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes and the fears of the struggle republican France waged against the German powers, and had seen that Kantian criticism contained within it a fire which would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology. Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed through his college career in a very creditable but by no means brilliant way. Among his fellows he had gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior, breathed a deep impassioned zeal for that higher life of which the nobler spirits among the young then, as now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling, singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art, and the receptivity of genius to catch and string together the theories that rose to the top in science and letters, had already made his mark as a philosophic writer, while his senior compatriot, leading the inconspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up and widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in metaphysics trod the same lines as Fichte; but in 1797(when he was aged 22) appeared hisIdeas towards a Philosophy of Nature.A year later he was lecturing at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and with Fichte, who, however, soon quitted the place. In 1800 appeared theSystem of Transcendental Idealism, and in 1801 theExposition of my System; followed in 1802 byBruno, and in 1803 by theLectures on University Studies.Brief periods of academic teaching at Würzburg, Erlangen, and Munich, and after 1841 at Berlin, broke the silence which set in after hisInquiries into the nature of human libertyin 1809; but little certain was known to the outside public of the final standpoint till the publication of his collected works (1856-61).

An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon they historian as he surveys Schelling's career. Seldom had a thinker's life begun with better promise, and more distinguished performance; seldom had a nobler inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided and propelled the intellectual interest; seldom had expectation of greater things yet to come followed a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling. On one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the results of scientific discovery, at least in its more suggestive advances: on the other, a mastery of words and style which fitted him to hold his own amongst the literary leaders; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed to be religious, with the movement which soughtlucem ex Oriente, and wisdom from the treasures of the world's purer youth. And yet—in the main—the net result, oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a great thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the remark that even books and thinkers have their fates, and that some momentary forgetfulness let the tide slip unused. But it is possible to be less oracularly-obscure:and without detracting from the splendid faculty and great achievement of Schelling to note some of the causes of his lapse into a mere episode.

In the first place, though his conception is of a system, his performance is only a succession of fragments. The nearest approach to an encyclopaedic exposition of his ideas is found in his popularLectures on the Studies of University.More than once he starts on the task of exposition, but lets it break off about the middle. Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme of thought have slightly altered, and not merely does his philosophy profess at first to present two distinct sides, but these two sides of the shield vary. Thirdly, the interest in scientific novelties, always disposed to seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes on to fasten too greedily on the miraculous and mysterious night-side of nature, on magic powers and mystic discernments—a path which descends to the abyss of a 'positive,' i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy. The matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in Bavaria, and the Protestant theologian Paulus, once a friend, but latterly his bitterest foe) regard him as a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval obscurantism so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art renders him suspected: for there is an old quarrel between philosophy and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom is jealous of her gipsy rival. Ill-advised indications of a sense of lofty superiority to the average teacher increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents. Nor is it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to suggest that his first wife, Caroline, with all her wonderful attractions of intellect and character, and notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in encouragement and counsel, was too clever and toocritical not to sow many jealousies, and to add through the female line to the ranks of those with whom he stood suspect.

But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was a certain excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn attacks down by an abnormal subjectivity which would fain reform the surroundings wherever he went. Schelling stood more apart—animated by an immense curiosity, a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but withal he seemed not to have his heart, deeply set and pledged to a distinctively human interest. His first love is the Romance in nature; and when he turns to history it is by preference to ages far remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it achieve its work by the instrumentality of Art. Religion seems to culminate for him in a mythology. Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat of a disease—whence philosophy is to carry us—almost magically if possible—to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an instrument towards a great end—and that end a godlike, even if you like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy, in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy—at least as Hegel understood it—is merely neither: but the life, which never can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. And so Schelling could not earn the confidence which only goes to those who are felt to be fellow-fighters with those they lead.

With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main current of philosophy, of streams of idea and research which had already exercised a stimulative effect on the tone and products of the higher literature of Germany. As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the English and Scotch 'empiricists' shake him out of his'rationalist' dogmatism) Lessing—in a couple of pagesOn the reality of things outside God—threw doubts on the tenability of the ordinary deistic arrangement of his day, which set Godthereand man and his surroundingshere,each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of Spinoza, and Spinoza by the light of Leibniz: and, if he emphasised the absolute right to the completest individual self-development on one hand, he no less declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is insulated, nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences.' 'I thank the Creator that I must,—must the best,' he adds (1774). Of his conversations on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either decried, or—what is worse—misunderstood, by the established masters of instruction, they were welcomed by a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of thought.

Amongst these one of the most interesting and influential was Herder. Herder, who had been amongst Kant's students in 1763, and who has expressed his admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed-by to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the Kantian system. The two men were mentally and morally of different types: and in Herder's case, a sense of injury, in the end, positively blinded him to the meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the Kantian system laboured throughout from the fault of a dead logical formalism and abstractness: it inhabited a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the fresh breath of nature and the growing life of history, and from the eternal spirit of divine truth: it undermined (so hisexperience at Weimar[1]indicated) the traditional faith, and inspired its 'adepts' with a revolutionary superciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried logicality, its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to his poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-historical soul. Man—in his concrete completeness, in his physical surroundings and his corporeal structure, in his social organisation, in his literary and artistic life, above all in his poetry and traditions of religion—was the theme of his studies; and he looked with distrust on every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the total unity of humanity by a criticism first of this, and then a criticism of that side of it, carried on separately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his; and the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth around the figures of that visionary world hangs with a charm and a confusion around the ultimate horizon of Herder's ideas.

In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an essay (published 1778) for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy on the subject of 'Sensation and Cognition in the human Soul.' Its fundamental points are that 'no psychology is possible, which is not at every step a distinct physiology': that 'cognition and volition are onlyoneenergy of the soul': that 'all our thought has arisen out of and through sensation, and in spite of all distillation still contains copious traces of it': that there are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing sensation,—'one energy, and elasticity of the soul, which reaches its height through the medium of language.' 'What is material, what non-material inman, I know not,' he says; 'but I am in the faith that nature has not fastened iron plates between them,' 'Man is a slave of mechanism (but a mechanism disguised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and fancies himself free,' 'Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new phase of expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity of our will': they vary directly with each other: and 'love therefore is the highest reason'—a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we will not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly more divine Spinoza, whose philosophy and ethics turn wholly upon this axis.'

Herder's great work, however,—which, side by side with Lessing'sEducation of the Human Race,and with Kant'sIdea for a Universal History, helped to constitute that conception of history, as philosophy in concrete form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel,—was theIdeas for a Philosophy of History.It is the pendant and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with which it is nearly contemporaneous (1784-91). Even in history Kant emphasises the work of intelligence, of reason: and puts the intelligently-organised state—if possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be transformed into merely stimulating competition,—as the final triumph of the reason. To Herder, while on the one hand the nature-basis is all-essential, and must form the foundation of any genetic explanation of spiritual phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents itself rather as a free development of the many-sided individual—a development tempered by the association of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling presuppositions works out the end of culture: Herder, on the contrary, allows himself to introduce—but only in and from the dim background—a supernatural aid toactualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature. Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead appears, and a deified humanity looms ahead as the consummation of the process of evolution, the development between these two extreme poles is homogeneous and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout:

'Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind.' Man is from the first endowed with tendencies which, through the medium of society and tradition, carry him on to the double end, so hard to combine, of 'humanity and happiness,' 'humanity and religion.' But, for this training of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural endowment of the body: and Herder can go so far as to say that 'in order to delineate the duties of man, we need only delineate his form.' Developing under the influence of cosmic and geographical conditions, and formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation, a definitely proportioned mechanism, which is his distinctive and permanent specific character. General identity of plan and condition prevails for man and animals; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian inference which interprets the graduated diversity of type as indicating that man is the phase reachedpro temporein the gradual slide along which the continuous change of environment carries the unstable types which earlier environments have helped to form. For Herder's conception of nature there are fixed differences beyond which research cannot go; and we shall see that both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation.

Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little bookGod(1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture of Spinozism,one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand—but it was also an audacious—vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly called itselfamor erga rem infinitam et aeternam.'Spinoza,' says Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms likesubstance,mode, cause, are inadequate to interpret the intensity of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel[2].

It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins his first characteristic work,—theIdeas towards a philosophy of Nature.In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which all separate existence, body or mind, is only amodus, it is taken by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being. Every monad—and the human soul is the typical monad—is at once finite and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But—whether as underlying substance, or as unity of reality—both hold the cardinal doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity and unification—the identity—of what outside it appears as two sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise, therefore—or to see things in the absolute—is (not as Hegel's malicious joke puts it[3], to look at them 'in the night when all cows are dark,'—but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from the identity of theSpiritwithin us with theNaturewithout us.

Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis) of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed absolute thesis,—an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity, or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The 'I' is opposed to the'Thee,'and the 'Them,' and the 'It.' The 'thing'—or non-ego—is depreciated as compared with the thinker and willer. It is postulatedad majorem gloriamof the Ego: in order that I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to make out of it. Itisnothing but what itwill be—or will be if I do whatI ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The Absolute is not yet:—it is only the forecast of a postulated result.

'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism, then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature and Spirit. Nature—not Matter—is the one side: Mind or Spirit the other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy—a philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work. But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.[4]

[1]He held posts of large general superintendence over church and school affairs at Weimar.

[2]See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.

[3]Hegel,Werke, ii. 13.

[4]See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.

What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,' says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in which it appears immersed,—to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty, and to set it in free process of evolution: it means, in other words, to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view which sees in Nature only occurrences, or at the best sees the actionas a fact, not the action itselfin the action[1].' There is in short a process in nature parallel in character to what Fichte had exhibited for consciousness. The natural world is no longer subordinated, but to appearance co-ordinate: and evolution or development, exhibited under the logical title of a 'deduction,' is the common law of both. The real order and the ideal order of the world are equally the work of an infinite and unconditioned activity, 'which never quite exhausts itself in any finite product, and of which everything individual is only as it were a particular expression.' The nature which we see broken up in groups and masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as a series of steps in a process of development: the steps in a single continuous product which has been arrestedat several stages,—which presents distinct epochs, but nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to a single original ideal.

In Nature, as in Mind, the most typical phenomenon is an original heterogeneity, duplicity, or difference, which, however, points back to a still more fundamental homogeneity, unity, or identity. This primary unity or ground of unification does not indeed appear to sight; the 'soul of Nature,' theanima mundi,nowhere presents itself as such in its undivided simplicity; but only as the perpetually recurring re-union of what has been divided. But though unapparent, the absolute identity is the necessary presupposition of all life and existence, as of all knowledge and action. It is the link or 'copula' which perpetually reduces the antithesis to unity, and the heterogeneity to homogeneity, and the different to redintegration. To this fact of antithesis, presupposing and continually reverting to an original unity, Schelling gives the name 'Polarity,' 'It is impossible to construe the main physical phenomena without such a conflict of opposite principles. But this conflict only exists at the instant of the phenomenon itself. Each natural forceawakesits opposite. But that force has no independent existence: it only exists in this contest, and it is only this contest which gives it for the moment a separate existence. As soon as this contest ceases, the force vanishes, by retreating into the sphere of homogeneous forces[2].' Polarity, therefore, is a general law of the cosmos.

A ceaseless, limitless activity, therefore, as the basis or groundwork of all, for ever crossing, arresting, and limiting itself: an eternal war, which, however, is always being led back to peace,—a process of differentiation which rests upon, is the product of, and is for everforced back to integration, is the perpetual rhythm of the natural universe. It is a process in which can be traced three grades, stages, or 'powers' (first, second, and third, &c.). By its more generally descriptive name it is called Organisation. 'Organism,' says Schelling, 'is the principle of things. It is not a property of single natural objects; but, on the contrary, single natural objects are so many limitations, or single modes of apprehending the universal organism[3].' 'The world is an organisation; and a universal organism itself is the condition (and to that extent the positive) of mechanism[4].' 'Mechanism is to be explained from organism: not organism from mechanism.' 'Theessentialof all things islife: theaccidentalis only thekindof their life: and even the dead in Nature is not utterly dead,—it is only extinct life.'

But if the conception of an organism be thus the adequate or complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea is only realised as a third 'power' supervening on, and by means of two subordinate or inferior ranges or 'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,—the bare skeleton or framework which has to be clothed upon and informed with life and growth. This first 'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces, under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the original thetic unity which synthetises them, is Matter. In Matter we have the equilibrium and statical indifference of two opposing forces—one centrifugal, accelerating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding, attractive—which, working under the synthetising unity supplied by the force of universal gravitation, build up in their momentary arrests or epochs the various material forms. In this first 'power' we have as itwere the scheme or machinery through which organisation will work: the outward and 'abstract, organism. And the essential feature of this 'construction' or 'deduction' of matter is that it does not take material atoms and build them into a world, but 'deduces' the properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing forces, and as due to the temporary syntheses resulting from the presence of unity making itself felt in the opposites.

A second and higher 'power' is seen in the physical universe as it presents, itself to the sciences of electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. If the former briefly be denominated the mechanical, this is the chemical world. The law of polarity is here especially prominent: the neutrality or indifference of parts is replaced by an intenser antithesis and affinity: and the return from heterogeneity to homogeneity takes place with more striking and even sudden effect. Here, matter, even as inorganised, has a certainsimulacrumof life and sensibility: there is in it the trace of a spirit which emerges above the mere contiguity and juxtaposition of mechanical atoms. The atomic theory shows itself less and less adequate as an attempt to represent the whole phenomena of inanimate matter, and the material universe is already charged with sympathies and antipathies which are full of the promise and the potency of the organic world.

The mechanical theory of the universe, in the ordinary sense, which deals with the mathematical formulation of the laws of planetary movement, had been the work of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century had seen attempts to explain thestatus quoof the planetary system as a resultant from the evolution of an elementary molecular state of the cosmic mass. With the close of the eighteenth century there appeared a groupof new sciences dealing with subtler energies of matter,—with electricity, galvanism, and above all with the connexions of chemical, electric, and magnetic science. The ideas thus suggested—embraced with some generality under the title Polarity—threw light backward upon the old mechanical conceptions, and gave them a decidedly dynamic character. Even the tranquil rest of geometrical figures came to be explained as a meeting point and transition moment of opposite forces. But these ideas produced an even greater effect on biology. Here, too, the need of a special 'vital force' to explain life and organisation disappeared: organism was but a higher stage, a completer truth of mechanism: and both found their explanation in the antithesis and synthesis of forces, or in differentiation and integration of what has recently been termed an 'idée-force.' In this direction, so far as Schelling was concerned, the obvious stimulus came from the programme sketched by Kielmeyer at Stuttgart in 1793, in a lecture 'on the proportions of organic forces,' According to Kielmeyer there are three types of force in the animal organisation, sensibility, irritability and reproduction[5]. The last of these is the basic force which builds up and propagates the animal system. With irritability, or contraction in response to external stimuli—material adaptation to environment—a higher level of animal life is reached. But the highest of all forces in the living being is sensibility. In this same order may we reasonably conceive that the 'plan of nature' proceeds. Her first products show little beyond that reproductive power which makes broad and high the pyramid of life. But as the creature acquires increasing heterogeneity and a comparatively independent position, it plays the part of a re-agent against stimuli, and a source of movements.Lastly, it not merely responds to, but assimilates and appropriates the impression into a sensation: it internalises the external, and carries within itself by means of the sensibility an ever-increasing picture of the world around it.

The idea of Evolution or Development, thus introduced by Schelling into philosophy as a governing principle in the study of matter and of mind, is not to be confused either with the older use of these terms or with their current applications to-day[6]. By evolution (or development) and involution (or envelopment) the earlier speculation on biology had denoted the view that the organic germ containedin parvoall that the matured organism showed in large. As the mature bulb of the healthy hyacinth shows, when cut open, to the naked eye, the stem and flowers that will issue from it next spring; so in general the seed can be treated as a miniature organism needing only an increase of bulk to make it fully visible in details. Growth is thus not accretion, but explication and enlargement of a microscopic organism subsisting in the germ.

Evolution, in the present time, and especially since Darwin, means something more than this. It implies a theory of descent of the variety of existing organisms from other organisms of a previous age, less individualised in forms and functions. From comparatively simple and homogeneous creatures there have issued in the course of ages creatures of more complex, more highly differentiated structure; and this process of gradual differentiation may be conceived as going on through an all but infinite period. At one end we may conceive matter, just endowed with the faculties of life and organisation, but in a minimal degree; at the other end of the developmental process, creatures whichhave organised within themselves powers, maximal both in range and variety. The result (so far as we at present go) is a genealogy of organism which, to quote Darwin, pictures before us a 'great tree of life which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.'

Even Bugon, seeing how naturally he could regard 'the wolf, the fox, and the jackal' as 'degenerate species of a single family,' concluded we could not go wrong in supposing that 'nature could have with time drawn from a single being all other organised beings.' Erasmus Darwin (1794) had insisted on the power of 'appetency' in the organs of a living creature to create and acquire new structures which it handed down to its posterity. G. R. Treviranus[7]in hisBiology(1802-5) had noted the influence of environment, and Jean Lamarck in hisPhilosophie Zoologique(1809) had—after assuming that 'nature created none but the lowest organisms'—maintained that need and use (or disuse) can so effectively modify a creature that it may even produce new organs, and give rise by imperceptible degrees to a variety of creatures as widely divergent as they now appear. E. g. 'The giraffe owes its long neck to its continued habit of browsing upon trees.' And gradually it had become recognised by speculators on this subject that, as Mr. H. Spencer wrote in 1852, 'by small increments of modification any amount of modification may in time be generated.' Finally, in 1859, Darwin, with an ample resource of illustrative examples, enforced the doctrine that the existing fauna andflora of the earth represent the result of a struggle for existence, protracted during vast ages, in which those creature's have been preserved (selected to live) which, among all the variously-endowed offspring of any kind, were best fitted to appropriate the means of subsistence in the circumstances in which they for the time found themselves placed. The circumstances of life on the globe are perpetually varying from place to place and time to time: progeny never exactly reproduce their parents, and diverge widely from each other: hence each form of life is perpetually sliding on from phase to phase, and only those survive which are best adapted to the new conditions of life.

So far as Darwinism is an attempt to show that the classes of plants and animals are not a mere juxtaposition and aggregation, but are to be explained by reference to a single genetic principle, it is in harmony with the Evolution taught by Schelling and Hegel. Both alike overthrow the hard and fast lines of division which semi-popular science insists upon, and restore the continuity of existence. Both regard Nature as an organic realm, developing by action and re-action within itself, living a common life in thorough sympathy and solidarity, and not a mere machine in which the several parts retain without change the features and functions impressed upon them at creation by some supernal architect. But they differ in other points. Ordinary Darwinism, at least, talks as if circumstances and organism were independent originally, and only brought as it were, incidentally, in contact and correlation. It fails to keep hold of the fact—of which it is abstractly aware—that the two act upon and modify each other because they are members of a larger organism. It forgets, in short, what Schelling so thoroughly realised, that the organic and inorganic,ordinarily so called, are both in a wider sense organic. It wants the courage of recognising its own tacit presuppositions.

But the characteristic difference between the evolution theory of to-day and that meant by the philosophers is different from this, though connected with it. 'The assertion,' says Schelling, 'that the various organisms have formed themselves by gradual development from one another, is a misconception of an Idea which really lies in reason[8].' And Hegel no less decidedly asserts that 'Metamorphosis' (as the term was then applied, e. g. by Goethe, to what we now call Evolution) reallyexistsas a fact only in the case of the living individual,—not in the supposed or theoretical continuity of the species. 'It is an awkward way both ancient and modern speculative biology have had of presenting the development and transition of one physical form and sphere into a higher one as an outwardly-actual production,—which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been thrown back into the darkness of the past.'[9]Yet notwithstanding these and even later protests, there is a great charm for many minds in the evolutionist picture, e. g., of the horse of to-day as the literal descendant through nearly fifty great stages (called species) from some creature of the eocene age, which gradually transformed itself in consequence of innate instability or variability of construction and in obedience to changes in its environment. But whatever value there may be in these as yet hypothetical aids to the imagination in grasping and unifying the variety of organic life, they run on another line from the philosophical evolution. That evolution is in theIdea, theNotion.It is the 'fluidity' of terms of thought that ishere sought, not of the kinds of things,—except in a secondary way. And above all, philosophy does not deal with a problem in time, with a mere sequence; if it deals with a history of nature, the agents of that history are powers and forces—and powers which are ideal no less than real.

A nearer approach to the philosophic conception is to be found in the views which modern physiology takes of the nature of organic structure and function[10]. In the simplest phases of protoplasm, the apparently homogeneous mass is really undergoing a series of changes, and indeed only exists as such, because it is the ever-renewed resultant of two correlated processes,—a movement up (anabolic change) by which dead matter is assimilated and built into it, and a movement down (katabolic changes) by which its composing elements are disintegrated and left behind, with accompanying liberation of energy. Protoplasm or 'living matter' is the incessantly formed and re-formed thin line on which these two currents for the moment converge,-a temporary crest of white foam, as it were, raising itself on the Heraclitean wave of vicissitude, where all things flow on and nothing abides. But wherever protoplasm arises and maintains itself on this borderline of ascending and descending states, it exhibits the three well-known properties of assimilation, contractility, and sensitiveness. Protoplasm, placed as it were in the mean between these two processes, is or has the synthetic power which governs them and keeps them in one. It is no mere chemical substance, undergoing composition and decomposition, but rather, if looked at from the somewhat speculative standpoint of molecular physics, a kind of intricate movement or dance ofparticles, a shape or 'form' instinct with the power of producing and reproducing itself, and, ultimately, in some highly differentiated phases (nerve-system), with a power of producing and reproducing a world of imagination.

A philosophy of Nature is only half a philosophy. Its purport is to set free the spirit in nature, to release intelligence from its imprisonment in material encasements which hide it from the ordinary view, and to gather together thedisjecta membraof the divine into the outlines of one continuous organisation. It seeks to spiritualise nature, i. e. to present the inner idea, unity, and genetic interdependence of all its phenomena: to delineatenatura formaliter spectatanot as a logical skeleton of abstract categories, but in its organisation and continuous life. There remains the problem of what Schelling calls 'Transcendental Idealism':—called 'transcendental' to avoid confusion with the vulgar idealism which supposes the world to be what it calls a mere 'idea' or phantom of the mind. Schelling's is on the contrary an 'Ideal-Realism': it 'materialises the laws of intelligence to laws of nature[11].'

We need not in details consider the genesis of Reality from the action of the Ego. Substantially it is the same as that given by Fichte. An activity, which is at once self-limiting and superior to all limit, rises through stage to stage, from sensation and intuition, to reflection and intelligence, till it becomes the consciousness of a world of ob; ective reality. 'Give me,' says the transcendental philosopher, 'a nature with opposing activities, of which the one goes to infinity, and the other endeavours to behold itself in this infinity,—and from that I will show you intelligence arising with the whole system of its ideas[12].' In the first phase the'ideal-real' world arises by the synthetic action of the 'productive intuition,' Ideas, as it were, live and move: they grow and build up: causality is neither a category nor a schema, but an intelligent 'form' which is also a force—an 'idée-force,' They are (in the Hegelian sense) 'Ideas,' i.e. neither merely objective nor merely subjective, but both at once. But such an ideal world is outside and beyond consciousness: it belongs to the same region as that higher Ego where there is no distinction between the Ego I am and the Ego I know. To follow the movement in this region needs a combination of mental vision and visual intellect, which Schelling has called the 'Intellectual Intuition.' It is a power which rising above the materialism of sense yet retains its realism; which, while intellectual, is free from abstractness. It is synthetic, and widely different from mere logical analysis. It is, in short, analogous to the artistic genius: it creates a quasi-objectivity, an ideal-reality, without which the mere words of the speculator are meaningless. By means of this 'organ,' philosophy can 'freely imitate and repeat the original series of actions in which the one "act" of self-consciousness is evolved[13].

But the 'productive intuition' is, as Kant would say, blind: it is unconscious in its operation: and it is only after an arrest, a Sabbath when it surveys and judges its work, that it begins to realise itself through a process of analysis and reflection which elicits and fixes the categories that have been operative in it. By this abstraction intelligence rises out of mere production to intelligent and conscious production, i.e. to volition, where it has an ideal and realises it. With volition and voluntary action, objectivity is to appearancefurther certified and fortified. It is as active, i. e. as free, and even moral, agents, that we set forward categorically the reality of the world. So, too, Fichte had declared. But, as Schelling reminds us, with this intensified assertion of a law and an ideal to which the real must and shall correspond,—with the declaration that the realm of absolute consistency and ideal truth of reason is the true and real for ever and ever—we come across the fundamental antithesis of the 'Is' and the 'Ought,5 of the objective and subjective, of unconscious necessity and self-conscious freedom. With an attempt to get a philosophy of history,—i. e. of man and mind as the culminating truth of things, we see ourselves confronted with the opposition of fatalism and chance. On one hand history is only possible for beings who have an ideal in view,—one persistent aim and principle which their work and will is the means of realising. And yet it is an ideal which only the series of generations, only the whole race, can realise. Man's license to do or to refrain rests upon a larger, latent, divine necessity which constrains it. What human agents by their free choice determine and carry out, is carried out, in the long run, by the force of an everlasting and unchanging order, to which their wills seem but a mere plaything. But that man's free agency should thus harmonise with the constrained uniformities of nature is only possible on the assumption that both are phenomena of a common ground, or basis of identity, of an 'absolute identity, in which there is no duplication, and which for that reason, because the condition of all consciousness is duplication, can never reach consciousness. This ever-Unconscious, which, as it were the everlasting Sun in the spirit-kingdom, is hidden in its own undimmed light, and which, though it is never an object, still impresses itsidentity on all free objects, is simultaneously the same for all intelligences, the invisible "root" of which all intelligences are only the "powers," and the everlasting mediator between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or percipient,—simultaneously the ground of the uniformity in freedom, and of the freedom in uniformity of the objective[14].' To rise to the sense of this Absolute Identity, as common basis of harmony between the 'Ought' and the 'Is,' is to recognise Providence: it is Religion.

But this 'Absolute' is never in history completely revealed—we cannotseefree action coincide with predetermination. Thus if History as a whole be> conceived as a 'continuous and gradual self-revelation; of the Absolute,' 'God neveris,ifismeans exhibition; in the objective world:if God were, weshould not be[15].' Nor is the Absolute so revealed in Nature. Yet, even as the apparent contingency of human action throws us back on an everlasting necessity which is yet freedom, so the apparent uniformity of natural order shows us in organic life the traces of a free self-regulating development. To apprehend the truth at which both seem to point we want an organ of intelligence which shall unite in itself the conscious activity of free production with the unconscious instinct of natural creation. Such an organ is found in they aesthetic power of genius, in the Artist. The artistic product is the work of two intimately-conjoined principles:—of the art (in the narrower sense) which can be taught and learned, and is exercised consciously and with reflection, and of that 'poesy in Art,' the unconscious grace of genius which can neither be handed down nor acquired, but can only be inborn by free gift of nature. In the work thus brought tobirth there is something definite, precise, and capable of exposition in finite formulae: there is also something which no 'prose' can ever explicate, something which tells us of the infinite and eternal, which ever reveals and yet conceals the Absolute and Perfect. Art, thus springing from 'imagination, the one sole power by which we can think and conjoin even the contradictory,' gives objectivity and outward shape to that 'intellectual intuition' by which the philosopher subjectively (in his own consciousness) sought to realise to himself the unity of thought and existence.

'To the philosopher,' Schelling concludes, 'Art is supreme, because it as it were opens to him the Holy of Holies, where in everlasting and original unity there burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted asunder in nature and history, and what in life and conduct, no less than in thinking, must for ever flee apart. The view the philosopher artificially makes for himself of nature is for Art the original and natural. What we call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange and secret characters. Yet could the riddle be disclosed, we should recognise in it the Odyssey of the mind, which, strangely deceived, in seeking itself, flees from itself: for through the sense-world there is a glimpse, only as through words of the meaning, only as through half-transparent mist of the land %of imagination, after which we yearn. That splendid picture emerges, as it were, by the removal of the invisible partition-wall which sunders the actual and the ideal world, and is only the opening by which those figures and regions of the world of imagination, that but imperfectly glimmer through the actual, come forward in all their fulness. Nature is to the artist no more than it is to the philosopher, viz. the ideal world as it appears under constant limitations, or only theimperfect reflex of a world which does not exist outside him, but within him.'

'If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making objective and universally accepted what the philosopher can only exhibit subjectively, it may also be expected that philosophy, as it was in the infancy of science born and nourished by poetry, and with it all those sciences which were by it carried on towards perfection, will after their completion flow back as so many single streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they issued. Nor is it in general hard to say what will be the means for the return of science to poetry: for such a means has existed in mythology before this, as it now seems, irrevocable separation took place. But as to how a new mythology,—which cannot be the invention of the single poet, but of a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet,—can itself arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be expected only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of history[16].'

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