Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/471

PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. 449 spiritual element in it ; it is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By transferring to na- ture the power of self-position or of being subject, Schell- ing exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne. The threefold division, " infinite original activity — nature or object — individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature, natura naturans. Schelling's aim is to show how from the object a subject arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem if he conceived natural objects — in the highest of which, man, he makes con. scious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself — as themselves the products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Schelling by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one framed for intelligence ; in the former, moreover, the natura natiirata appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increas- ing intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds. Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially identical : " That which is posited out of consciousness is in its essence the same as that which is posited in conscious- ness also." Therefore " the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real development-series — these are ideas from Herder