in the old
mythology--why should not this repeat itself in the future?

%2. System of Identity.%

The assertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature
and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into
the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the
identity of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into
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.[1]

[Footnote 1: The philosophy of identity is given in the following
treatises: _Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further
Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and
Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical
Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature,
Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature_ (both in the _Jahrbuecher fuer
Medizin), 1806_. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine:
the additions to the second edition of the _Ideas_, 1803, and the
_Exposition_, against Fichte, 1806.]

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 imagination, 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 particular to inadequate
representation, the philosopher views them _sub specie aeterni_, in their
_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 all cows are black.)

The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself i