rit is still
potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute identity
than the organism, although, principiantly considered, the greatest
possible approximation to the equilibrium of the real and the ideal is as
much attained in the one as in the other). The second difference lies in
the fact that the idea of development is entirely lacking in Spinoza, while
in Schelling it is everywhere dominant. It reminds one of Lessing and
Herder, who also attempted to combine Spinozistic and Leibnitzian elements.

%3a. Doctrine of Freedom.%

The system of identity had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the
real world of absolute identity and the imagined world of differentiated
and changeable individual things; it had traced back the latter to the
former as its ground, but had not deduced it from the former. Whence, then,
the imagination which, instead of the unchangeable unity, shows us the
changing manifold? Whence the imperfections of the finite, whence evil?
The pantheism of Spinoza is inseparably connected with determinism, which
denies evil without explaining it. Evil and finitude demand explanation,
not denial, and this without the abandonment of pantheism. But explanation
by what? By the absolute, for besides the absolute there is naught. How,
then, must the pantheistic doctrine of the absolute be transformed in order
that the fact of evil and the separate existence of the finite may become
comprehensible? To this task are devoted the _Inquiries into the Nature of
Human Freedom (Philosophical Works_, vol. i., 1809, with which should be
compared the _Memorial of Jacobi_, 1812, and the _Answer to Eschenmayer_,
1813).

As early as in the _Bruno_, the problem occasionally emerges why matters do
not rest with the original infinite unity of the absolute, why the finite
breaks away from the identical primal ground. The possibility of the
separation, it is answered, lies in the fact that the finite is like the
infinite _realiter_, and yet, ideally, is different from it; the actuality
of the coming forth, however, lies in the non-deducible self-will of
the finite. Then after Eschenmayer[1] _(Philosophy in its Transition to
Not-philosophy_, 1803) had characterized the procession of the Ideas out of
the Godhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy
must yield to faith, Schelling, in the essay _Religion and Philosophy_,
1804, goes more deeply into the problem. The origin of the sense-world is