you come face to face with spontaneous life. "What is described in concepts," Schelling tells us, "is at rest, hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of motion is not motion itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, is comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity. If we had no intellectual intuition, we should be caught eternally in our objective ideas, ... and there could be no transcendental thinking, no imagination rising above sense-experience, no philosophy, either theoretical or practical."
All this means that natural science and philosophy have their special fields and special methods, that the former merely scratches the surface of reality, while the latter grasps its meaning: "the true philosophy is interested in the living, moving element in nature." We can understand the world when and only when we rise from death into life, and we can know life only by being alive and free, hence philosophy begins with an act of will. Im Anfang war die That. The phenomenal world is a means of realizing the living will of the world, and sense-perception and intelligence are instruments in the service of the will, which for Fichte is a moral will, for Schelling an absolute will, an élan vital.
These two post-Kantians are, like their master, voluntarists in the double sense of making the basal principle of reality and of the knowledge of reality. They are instrumentalists in ascribing to sense-perception and intelligence a practical value through conceiving them as incapable of revealing the living truth. They are pragmatists when they declare that the controversy between materialism and idealism, mechanism and freedom, cannot be decided by theoretical reason, but only by "inclination and interest," that is, by the will to believe. They are intuitionists: we cannot refute materialism or prove idealism to one who has not made himself free and does not experience freedom himself; indeed we cannot even make the problem mean anything to him. And with Kant and many others of the age they are humanists, proclaiming the worth and dignity of men, and so reflecting in their philosophy the spirit of ethical individualism which had found expression in the French revolution.
