SYSTEAf OF J DEN Tl TV. 457 a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a basis for them, and in Schelling's exposition of which several phases must be distinguished.* Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of the imagina- tion, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence to isolating thought alone ; they possess as such no true reality, and speculation proves them void. While things appear par- ticular to inadequate representation, the philosopher views'j them sub specie ceterni, in .tr per se, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas. To construe things is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one ; in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-; to Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which allj cows are black.) The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not entirely lost : each particular existence is a
- The philosophy of identity is given in the following treatises : Exposition
cf my System of Philosophy, 1801 ; Furtlur Expositions of the System 0/ Phi- losophy, 1802 ; Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, 1803 ; Lectures on tfie Method ef Academical Study, 1803 ; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature (both in the fahrbiicher fur Medizin), 1B06. Besides these the follow- ing also bear on this doctrine : the additions to the second edition of the Ideas, 1803, and the Exposition, against Fichte, 1806.
