e
previous negative (rational) philosophy.

%1a. Philosophy of Nature.%

Schelling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science,
the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the
question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise? They
agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts,
outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but
seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these
actions. Nature exists in order that the ego may develop. But while Fichte
correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into
being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of
all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated
it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego. Nature
is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order,
striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to
reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further,
working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical
activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit
develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it
is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By
transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject,
Schelling 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
conscious 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 sp