nity, independence of time, self-affirmation. This
"ground of existence" is an obscure "longing" to give birth to self, an
unconscious impulse to become conscious; the goal of this longing is the
"understanding," the Logos, the Word, wherein God becomes revealed to self.
By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its
matter and instrument, God becomes actual God, becomes spirit and love. The
operation of the light understanding on the dark nature-will consists in a
separation of forces, whence the visible world proceeds. Whatever in the
latter is perfect, rational, harmonious, and purposive is the work of the
understanding; the irrational remainder, on the other hand, conflict and
lawlessness, abortion, sickness and death, originates in the dark ground.
Each thing has two principles in it: its self-will it receives from nature
in God, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding,
it is the instrument of the universal will. In God the light and dark
principles stand in indissoluble unity, in man they are separable. The
freedom of man's will makes him independent of both principles; going over
from truth to falsehood, he may strive to make his selfhood supreme and
to reduce the spiritual in him to the level of a means, or--with divine
assistance--continuing in the center, he may endeavor to subordinate
the particular will to the will of love. Good consists in overcoming
resistance, for in every case a thing can be revealed only through its
opposite. If man yields to temptation it is his own guilty choice. Evil is
not merely defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood breaking
away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the
universal will. The possibility of a separation of the two wills lies in
the divine ground (it is "permitted" in order that by overmastering the
self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is
the free act of the creature. Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian
sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion:
Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates
himself in the first creation, _i.e._, from eternity, and is responsible
for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that
free primal act.

[Footnote 1: K. Ad. Eschenmayer was originally a physician, then, 1811-36,
professor of philosophy in Tuebingen, and died in 1852 at Kirchh