mong the rest, as unfit for the
acceptance and pursuit of responsible beings. The two principles which
furnish the key to his views were that religion lies in the feeling, and
that this feeling, which exists in every man's heart, is not reflected,
but original. His dissatisfaction with all systems induced him to term
himself the _Unphilosophical_, and it was with utter disgust that he was
led to declare the foundation of all speculative philosophy to be only a
great cavity, in which we look in vain, as down into an awful abyss.
With him, as with Coleridge, Faith begins where Reason ends.

The two bright stars after Kant were Fichte and Schelling. The former
commenced with the system of the great Koenigsberg teacher, and developed
it on the negative side, contending that the whole material world has no
existence apart from ourselves, and that it only appears to us in
conformity with certain laws of our mind. He aimed to found a system
which might illustrate, by a single principle, the material and formal
properties of all science; establish the unity of plan which the
critical system had failed to maintain; and solve that most difficult of
all problems regarding the connection between our conceptions and their
objects. His views of God are the most glaring defect of his system. He
contended that we cannot attribute to the Deity intelligence or
personality without making him a finite being like ourselves; that it is
a species of profanation to conceive of him as a separate essence, since
such a conception implies the existence of a sensible being limited by
space and time; that we cannot impute to him even existence without
compounding him with sensible natures; that no satisfactory explanation
has yet been given of the manner in which the creation of the world
could be effected by God; that the idea and expectation of happiness is
a delusion; and that, when we form our notions of the Deity in
accordance with such imaginations, we only worship the idol of our own
passions,--the prince of this world.[35]

Schelling was a man of ardent, sanguine temperament, and it was his
natural proclivities that gave rise to his system of philosophy. He
attributes a real existence to the material as well as to the immaterial
world, but permits it a different mode of existence. He makes history a
necessity. This natural philosophy conveys to us no knowledge of God,
and the little it does reveal appears opposed to religion. What God
perfo