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4^4 SCHELLING. defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood break- ing away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the universal will. The possibility of a separa- tion of the two wills lies in the divine ground (it is " per- mitted " in order that by overmastering the self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is the free act of the creature. Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion : Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature ; he predestinates himself in the first creation, i. e., from eternity, and is responsible for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that free primal act. As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the two original grounds of things do battle with one another. The golden age of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the om- nipotence of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the spiritual light was born in per- sonal form. The subsequent conflict of good against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything subordinated to spirit, and thus the com- plete identity of the ground of existence and the existing God be brought about. Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine mo- ments, SchelHng recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms indifference or groundlessness ; the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega) is called identity or spirit. In the former the contraries are not yet present ; in the latter they are present no longer. The groundless divides into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and under- standing, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby the absolute develop into the personal God. In this way Schelling endeavors to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism and pan-