irit 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 naturata_
appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as
a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing
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_ consciousness 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 which Schelling introduces
into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with
its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the
_Naturphilosophie_ by Herder's physicism.

"Nature _is a priori_" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by
the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature
can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature
anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as _subject_,
becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being,
product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing
reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature,
as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities,
one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the
universal law of _polarity_. The absolute productivity strives toward an
infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no
product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that
something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result
of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a
negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the
creative activity manifests itself in various wa