is short residence at Jena
was troubled by violent conflicts with his colleagues. It was brought to
an end by his marriage with the wife of Augustus von Schlegel, who had
been divorced for the purpose. From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich in
retirement. The long-expected books which were to fulfil his early
promise never appeared. Hegel's stricture was just. Schelling had no
taste for the prolonged and intense labour which his brilliant early
works marked out. He died in 1854, having reached the age of
seventy-nine years, of which at least fifty were as melancholy and
fruitless as could well be imagined.

The dominating idea of Schelling's philosophy of nature may be said to
be the exhibition of nature as the progress of intelligence toward
consciousness and personality. Nature is the ego in evolution,
personality in the making. All natural objects are visible analogues and
counterparts of mind. The intelligence which their structure reveals,
men had interpreted as residing in the mind of a maker of the world.
Nature had been spoken of as if it were a watch. God was its great
artificer. No one asserted that its intelligence and power of
development lay within itself. On the contrary, nature is always in the
process of advance from lower, less highly organised and less
intelligible forms, to those which are more highly organised, more
nearly the counterpart of the active intelligence in man himself. The
personality of man had been viewed as standing over against nature, this
last being thought of as static and permanent. On the contrary, the
personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but
the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in
nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the
unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these
are at last seen in man. Of course, it was the life of organic nature
which first suggested this notion to Schelling. An organism is a
self-moving, self-producing whole. It is an idea in process of
self-realisation. What was observed in the organism was then made by
Schelling the root idea of universal nature. Nature is in all its parts
living, self-moving along the lines of its development, productivity and
product both in one. Empirical science may deal with separate products
of nature. It may treat them as objects of analysis and investigation.
It may even take the whole of nature as an object. But natur