his idealism conceives it, is the moral law. The infinite self longs for rational and active self-possession. Hence it differentiates itself into numerous forms, as the vine grows out into its own branches. These branchings of the one great vine of the spirit form our finite and essentially incomplete selves.
But for the romanticists, as we found, the centre of the world is not so much the moral law as the interest which every spirit has in a certain divine wealth of emotion and of experience. The world is the world of ideas; things exist because spirits experience them; and spirits experience because, as parts of the divinely complete life, it is their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in their self-realization as possible.
I.
Before we now pass directly to Hegel it is necessary
to say yet a word of the more technical speculations of
Schelling, of whom, in his character as romanticist, we
heard something in the last lecture. Schelling’s development,
as you already know, was very rapid; his writings
were early voluminous. He was a man of mark and a
professor at Jena by the time he had reached his twenty-third
year. His systematic views during his youthful
period seemed to his readers to alter with a dangerously
magical ease and swiftness of transformation. He
himself meanwhile denied, during the years up to 1809, that
there was so far any significant change from the essential
doctrines of his early works. He had added, he said, to
what he at first taught. More truth had come to him;
not a contradiction of former insight. But readers found
it suspicious that each new book of Schelling’s seemed to
supersede all his previous efforts. In 1797, he published
his “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature.” During
the next three years appeared his “System of Transcendental
Idealism” and his “First Sketch of a System of
the Philosophy of Nature.” These two latter works were
