rything is God and the world does not exist.

We have no need to follow Fichte farther. Suffice it to say, with
reference to the theory of knowledge, that he had discovered that one
could not stand still with Kant. One must either go back toward the
position of the old empiricism which assumed the reality of the world
exactly as it appeared, or else one must go forward to an idealism more
thorough-going than Kant had planned. Of the two paths which, with all
the vast advance of the natural sciences, the thought of the nineteenth
century might traverse, that of the denial of everything except the
mechanism of nature, and that of the assertion that nature is but the
organ of spirit and is instinct with reason, Fichte chose the latter and
blazed out the path along which all the idealists have followed him. In
reference to the philosophy of religion, we must say that, with all the
extravagance, the pantheism and mysticism of his phrases, Fichte's great
contribution was his breaking down of the old dualism between God and
man which was still fundamental to Kant. It was his assertion of the
unity of man and God and of the life of God in man. This thought has
been appropriated in all of modern theology.

SCHELLING

It was the meagreness of Fichte's treatment of nature which impelled
Schelling to what he called his outbreak into reality. Nature will not
be dismissed, as simply that which is not I. You cannot say that nature
is only the sphere of my self-realisation. Individuals are in their way
the children of nature. They are this in respect of their souls as much
as of their bodies. Nature was before they were. Nature is, moreover,
not alien to intelligence. On the contrary, it is a treasure-house of
intelligible forms which demand to be treated as such. It appeared to
Schelling, therefore, a truer idealism to work out an intelligible
system of nature, exhibiting its essential oneness with personality.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born in 1775 at Leonberg in
Wuerttemberg. His father was a clergyman. He was precocious in his
intellectual development and much spoiled by vanity. Before he was
twenty years old he had published three works upon problems suggested by
Fichte. At twenty-three he was extraordinarius at Jena. He had
apparently a brilliant career before him. He published his _Erster
Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophe_, 1799, and also his _System
des transcendentalen Idealismus_, 1800. Even h