t
is always ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition.
Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were already familiar to Schelling
as a pupil at Tuebingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who
exerted a transforming influence on his system, to be followed later by
Neoplatonism and Boehme's mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and
the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse with his contemporaries
Kielmeyer, Steffens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others. Omitting his early
adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished
in Schelling's thinking. The first period (1797-1800) includes the
epoch-making feat of his youth, the _philosophy of nature_, and, as an
equally legitimate second part of his system, the philosophy of spirit or
_transcendental philosophy_. The latter is a supplementary recasting of
Fichte's Science of Knowledge, while in the former Schelling follows Kant
and Herder. The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate
parts, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, and as a
fundamental discipline, a science of the absolute, the _philosophy of
identity_, which may be characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean
basis. Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on
this form of Schelling's philosophy. With the year 1809, after the signs of
a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its
third, the theosophical, period, the period of the _positive philosophy_,
in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage. The former
is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob Boehme; the
latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to
Aristotle and the Gnostics. In the first period the absolute for Schelling
is creative nature; in the second, the identity of opposites; in the third
it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of
the contraries to their overcoming. In neither of these advances is it
Schelling's intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each
case only to add a supplement. That which has hitherto been the whole is
retained as a part. The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the
completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though
with a reversed procedure; then the theory of identity assumes a place
above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to th