And yet, all this must not discourage true idealism, and does not discourage it. What I mean is just what I have already repeatedly pointed out: That as arbitrariness in our interpretation of things is the curse of immature idealism, mature idealism will certainly find out how to return to an order as fixed and as supreme as was Spinoza’s substance.
IV.
Schelling, finally, the prince of the romanticists, is an interesting example of a growth of spirit whereby a great thinker was indeed led from Fichte back to Spinoza. Only to the end, while Schelling became the firmest of believers in a supreme and substantial order of things, which impresses itself upon our reason from above, and which we are all forced to obey and to accept, his method remains wayward, imaginative, and, with all his genius, immature. His Spinozism is such as Spinoza could never have pretended to comprehend; his idealism early became such as to excite first the suspicion, and finally the violent condemnation of Fichte; and his whole work is such as only a great genius could have begun, and only a romanticist could have left in the chaos wherein, after a very long life, he finally left it.
Even our brief glance at Schelling’s character must take into account the remarkable woman whose counsel and affection made a great part of his most productive years possible. I doubt whether Schelling, even as philosopher, can be well understood apart from Caroline. She herself was the idol of the whole romantic circle. Her maiden name was Michaelis; she was twelve years the senior of Schelling. When Schelling first met her, himself then early in his twenties, she was already married a second time, and to Augustus Schlegel. Her daughter by her first marriage, Auguste Böhmer, died in 1800, aged seventeen. As Schlegel, during the closing years of the century, lived in Berlin, and Caroline in Jena, their
