eim unter
Teck.]

As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the
two original grounds of things do battle with one another. The golden age
of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when
neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the omnipotence
of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although
it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the
spiritual light was born in personal form. The subsequent conflict of good
against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state
wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything
subordinated to spirit, and thus the complete identity of the ground of
existence and the existing God be brought about.

Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Schelling
recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity
of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms _indifference_ or groundlessness;
the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega)
is called _identity_ or spirit. In the former the contraries are not yet
present; in the latter they are present no longer. The groundless divides
into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and
understanding, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby
the absolute develop into the personal God. In this way Schelling endeavors
to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism
and pantheism, and to remove the difficulties which arise for pantheism
from the fact of evil, as well as from the concepts of personality and of
freedom.

In the two moments of the absolute (nature in God--personal spirit) we
recognize at once the antithesis of the real and ideal which was given
in the philosophy of identity. The chief difference between the mystical
period and the preceding one consists in the fact that the absolute itself
is now made to develop (from indifference to identity, from the neither-nor
to the as-well-as of the antithesis), and that there is conceded to the
sense-world a reality which is more than apparent, more than merely present
for imagination. That which facilitated this rapid, almost unceasing change
of position for Schelling, and which at the same time concealed the fact
from him, was, above all, the ambiguous and variable meaning of his leading
concepts. The "objective," fo