SCHELLING 667 North and South Beveland and "Walcheren. The lower part is bordered with dikes. Its principal tributaries are the Heine, Dender, and Rupel on the right, and the Sensee, Scarpe, and Lys on the left. The chief towns on its banks, besides those named, are Valenciennes, Tournay, Oudenarde, Dendermonde, and Ant- werp. Its length is 211 m., and it is naviga- ble to within a few miles of its source. The canal of St. Quentin, 60 m. long, connects it with the Somme and the Oise. SCHELLING, Friedrieh Wilhelm Joseph von, a Ger- man philosopher, born at Leonberg, near Stutt- gart, Jan. 27, 1775, died at Ragatz, Switzer- land, Aug. 20, 1854. His father was pastor at Leonberg, and subsequently prelate at Maul- bronn. Friedrich entered the university of Tubingen in 1790, and studied philosophy un- der Adler, a disciple of Wolf, and divinity with Storr. His essay for the doctorate of philosophy was on the origin of evil, as narra- ted in Gen. iii. His next treatise, in Paulus's Memorabilia (1793), was on myths and sagas. In 1795 appeared his first metaphysical essay, "On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy," and a few months later his dissertation, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophic, oder uber das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen. In his Philosophische Briefe uber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus, in Niethammer's Journal (1795), he grapples with Kant's sundering of the re- spective spheres of the theoretical and practi- cal reason, denouncing this dualism, and con- tending that there must be something uncon- ditional, which is the common source of both the objective and the subjective. There is " an intellectual intuition " of the uncondition- ed. Allowing the equal validity of both the subjective and objective, he already demands for both a higher unity. Thus at the age of 20, before he left the university, he had found the principle of his peculiar system, which was to supersede the critical philosophy of Kant and the subjective idealism of Fichte. After leaving Tubingen, he taught for two years at Leipsic, and wrote " Illustrations of the Ideal- ism of the Theory of Science " (Fichte's). A severe nervous fever brought him to the bor- ders of the grave. At the age of 24 he went to Jena, parted company with the idealism of Fichte, and began his more independent career in a series of brilliant lectures, which aroused the highest enthusiasm. At Jena he taught with Fichte and Hegel. The latter was older in years, but younger as a student. They edited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie together, and were not yet sensible of their divergence. Here was developed the second stage of Schelling's speculations, in his phi- losophy of nature and transcendental ideal- ism. In rapid succession he published Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Nfitur (vol. i., 1797, the only one published) ; Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der hoheren Physik znr Erkla- rung des allgemeinen Organisms s (1798 ; later editions contain also an essay Ueber das Ver- hdltniss des Realen und Idealen in der Natur) ; Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphi- losophie (1799) ; an " Introduction " to the last named; and System des transscendentalen Idealismus (1800). Most of these works were originally read as lectures, and some of them more carefully digested in the Neue Zeit- schrift fur speculative Physilc (1802-'3). His choice of nature as the subject of his specula- tions indicated his revolt from the subjective tendency. He said : Nature is life, a living or- ganism, replete with formative powers; there is an ideal in the real, a subject in the object, reason in matter. Nature is autonomic; there is a soul of the world, its immanent principle. Grasping this soul, we re-create nature. It is all one living organism, a perpetual process of production, through the whole series of in- organic and organic forms. All is pervaded by one law, the law of evolution ; and that law is a law of polarity, of polar forces. These act and react perpetually, as is seen in the phe- nomena of magnetism, electricity, and chemi- cal agency. The mechanical theory of nature was superseded by the idea of living forces. Experiment has verified some of Schelling's prognostications ; but the progress of research has left to his system as a whole only the value of a bold attempt at the reconstruc- tion of nature. He applied the same princi- ple of polarity in a more universal sense in his "Transcendental Idealism," which gives the outlines of the philosophy of spirit. The attempt is here made to derive all parts of philosophy from the intellectual intuition, con- sidered as an act of the subject bringing the objective before it, an act in which the high- est freedom and the highest necessity concur. Here the theoretical and practical parts of philosophy are unfolded, including an outline of the course of history, as a drama, which one mind has poetized; but that one mind is not yet with Schelling a personal deity. The third division of this treatise is on the "Phi- losophy of Art," following out the hints con- tained in Kant's " Criticism of the Judgment." Art is well nigh deified ; it is viewed as the highest product of man, the perfected union of the ideal and the real, of the subject and the object. The infinite embodied in the finite is in every work of art ; the artist grasps the eternal idea and realizes it in a perfected form ; he is a creative genius, and yet works under the law of necessity. These views are further unfolded in his elaborate essay Ueber das Verhaltniss der lildenden Kunste zur Natur (1807). By an inward and logical necessity Schelling was led on to another, the third stage of his system, known as the philosophy of iden- tity. He had already considered nature by it- self, and spirit by itself ; but the two, in a com- plete system, cannot remain sundered. The ideal and the real, the subjective and the ob- jective, hi next says, are identical. This he attempts to show in his exposition of his sys- tem in the Zeitschrift fur speculative Physilc
