conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a _falling away_,
which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its
subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus
ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a
free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary. The
counterpart of this attainment of independence on the part of things or
creation is history as the return of the world to its source. They are
related to each other as the fall to redemption. Both the dismission of the
world and its reception back, together with the intervening development,
are, however, events needed by God himself in order to become actual God:
He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the
Middle Ages: if God is to give a complete revelation of himself he must
make known his grace; and this presupposes sin. As the occasion of divine
grace, the fall is a happy, saving fault; without it God could not have
revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.)
Schelling's study of Jacob Boehme, to which he was led by Baader,
essentially contributed to the concentration of his thought on this point.
_The Exposition of the True Relation_, etc., already distinctly betrays the
influence of this mystic. In correspondence with Boehme's doctrine that God
is living God only through his inclusion of negation in himself, it is here
maintained: A being can manifest itself only when it is not merely one, but
has another, an opposition (the many), in itself, whereby it is revealed to
itself as unity. With the addition of certain Kantian ideas, in particular
the idea of transcendental freedom and the intelligible character,
Schelling's theosophy now assumes the following form:

The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless God of
Spinoza is to assume something in God which is not God himself, to
distinguish between God as existent and that which is merely the ground of
his existence or "nature in God." In God also the perfect proceeds from the
imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself. The actual, perfect God,
who is intelligence, wisdom, goodness, is preceded by something which is
merely the possibility of all this, an obscure, unconscious impulse toward
self-representation. For in the last analysis there is no being but
willing; to willing alone belong the predicates of the primal being,
groundlessness, eter