Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/209

spirit of nature. You cannot comprehend him if you look only within. In you he is indeed the same that he is yonder in nature, only in nature his will is writ large, in dead and in living forces, in gravitation, in magnetism, in electricity, in vitality. Study these things, not as if they were ever utterly dead things in themselves, but as being other expressions of precisely the same life that is writ fine in your consciousness. Thus, by reversing, as it were, the Fichtean telescope, you see the human subject indeed as the central being of the human world, only in himself he now appears less imposing. Turning, however, the right end of the glass towards nature, you see therein the life of humanity typified, symbolized, crystallized, as it were; for spirit comes to itself in man only because it has first expressed itself in nature, and is now striving in us to become conscious of its own work. Thus viewed, man is indeed simply an evolution from nature; and Schelling indeed holds that a theory of the evolution of consciousness is needed as a complement to Fichte’s theory. “In autumn, 1798, I entered upon my lectures at Jena,” says Schelling himself, in one of his autobiographical statements, “full of the thought that the way from nature to spirit must be as possible as the reverse way, upon which Fichte had entered.” Here, then, is Schelling’s epoch-making idea, and you will see hereafter that it is the idea which modern philosophic thought will henceforth be seeking to define. To complete the undertaking of idealism, you need a theory of the facts of nature, so interpreted as to be in harmony with the view that only ideas are the realities, and yet so adapted to experience as to free your idealism from the arbitrariness of the inner life of mere finite selves. Can we, then, prove that the very spirit whose life our own consciousness expresses is already present outside and beyond us, weaving the web of the external world, giving it substance, and yet preserving its ideality and its harmony