its law of contradiction has no binding authority for
speculation, which starts with the equalization of opposites. In the
_Aphorisms by way of Introduction_ science, religion, and art figure as
stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real
all--matter, motion, and organization. Nature culminates in man, history
in the state. Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the
return of the absolute to itself.

Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia,
_i.e._, his _Lectures on the Method of Academical Study_, is the
presupposition of all particular knowledge. The function of universities is
to maintain intact the connection between particular knowledge and absolute
knowledge. The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in
the absolute: Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite; History
and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula.
There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty,
which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable. The two lectures on
theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important. There are two forms of
religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him
in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the
Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which
Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of
providence begins. In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not
religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism. The speculative
kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the
Indian sages; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in
time, but as eternal. It has been a hindrance to the development of
Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred
books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic
thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents.

If, finally, we compare Schelling's system of identity with its model, the
system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent. Although both
thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal
manifestations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit
thought in dependence on extension (the soul represents what the body is),
while in Schelling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spi