The reputation so quickly gained led soon to its natural result. In midsummer 1798 Schelling was called as extraordinary professor of philosophy to Jena, and thus stepped into the most active literary and philosophical circle of the time. The intervening period had not been unfruitful. While discharging for two years at Leipsic the duties of companion or tutorial guardian to two youths of noble family, Schelling had contributed various articles and reviews to Fichte and Niethammer’s Journal, and had thrown himself with all his native impetuosity into the study of physical and medical science. From 1796 date the Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus, an admirably written critique of the ultimate issues of the Kantian system, which will still repay study; from 1797 the essay entitled Neue Deduction des Naturrechts, which to some extent anticipated Fichte’s treatment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts, published in 1796, but not before Schelling’s essay had been received by the editors of the Journal. The reviews of current philosophical literature were afterwards collected, and with needful omissions and corrections appeared under the title “Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre” in Schelling’s Philos. Schriften, vol. i., 1809. The studies of physical science bore rapid fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797, and the treatise Von der Weltseele, 1798, the drift of which will be noted later.

Schelling’s professoriate in Jena lasted till the early part of 1803. His lectures were extraordinarily attractive; his productive powers were at their best; and the circumstances of his surroundings developed forcibly the good and evil qualities of his character. Of his writings during this period a merely chronological notice will meanwhile suffice. In 1799 appeared the Erster Entururf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, with an independent and subsequent Einleitung ; in 1800 the System des transcendentalen Idealismus, in form one of the most finished, in substance one of the most satisfactory of his works; in the same year, in the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, edited by him, “Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes ”; and in 1801 the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie-, in 1802, in the Neue Zeitschr. für spek. Physik, the “Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie”; also in 1802 the dialogue Bruno and the excellently written Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums. In conjunction with Hegel, who in 1801 at Schelling’s invitation had come to Jena, he edited the Kritisches Journal für Philosophie, the greater part of which was written by Hegel. Regarding the authorship of certain articles in the volume and a half of this Journal a discussion of no great significance has arisen, concerning which perhaps the best statement is that by Schelling’s son in the preface to vol. v. of the Sämmtliche Werke, Abth. i.

The philosophical renown of Jena reached its culminating point during the years of Schelling’s residence there, in no small measure through the imposing force of his character and teaching. Recognized as of the first rank among living thinkers he was received with every mark of distinction, and his intellectual sympathies soon united him closely with some of the most active literary tendencies of the time. With Goethe, who viewed with interest and appreciation the poetical fashion of treating fact characteristic of the Naturphilosophie, he continued on excellent terms, while on the other hand he was repelled by Schiller’s less expansive disposition, and failed altogether to understand the lofty ethical idealism that animated his work. By the representatives of the Romantic school, then in the height of their fervour and beginning their downward course, he was hailed as a most potent ally, and quickly became par excellence the philosopher of the Romantic type. The Schlegels and their friends, who had found at least one fundamental principle of Romantic strain in Fichte, had begun to be dissatisfied with the cold and abstract fashion of viewing nature that seemed necessarily to follow from the notion of the Wissenschaftslehre, and at the same time the deep-seated antagonism of character between Fichte and the impetuous litterateurs of the Romantic school was beginning to be felt. In Schelling, essentially a self-conscious genius, eager and rash, yet with undeniable power, they hailed a personality of the true Romantic type, and in his philosophy a mode of conceiving nature adequate to the needs of poetic treatment. During the Jena period the closest union obtained between Schelling and those who either at Jena or at Berlin carried on warfare for the Romantic idea. With August Wilhelm Schlegel and his gifted wife Caroline, herself the embodiment of the Romantic spirit, Schelling’s relations were of the most intimate kind. Personal acquaintance made at Dresden before Schelling began his professorial career at Jena rapidly developed into a warm friendship, to which circumstances soon gave a new and heightened colour. Caroline Schlegel, a woman of remarkable receptive and appreciative power, emotional to excess, and full of the ardent ill-balanced sympathies that constituted the Romantic tone, felt for Schelling unbounded admiration. In him she found the philosophic view which gave completeness and consistency to the tumultuous literary and personal feelings that animated her, and she was not less attracted by the dominating force of his personal character. It is probable that in the early stages of their friendship a future marriage between Schelling and Caroline’s young daughter, Auguste Böhmer, was, if not definitely understood, yet vaguely contemplated by both, and that in consequence neither was fully aware of the nature of the feelings springing up between them. The untimely death of Auguste in the summer of 1800, a death in which Schelling’s rash confidence in his medical knowledge was unfor- tunately involved, while a severe blow to both, drew them much more closely together, and in the following year, A. W. Schlegel having removed to Berlin, and Caroline remaining in Jena, affairs so developed themselves that quietly, amicably, and in apparently the most friendly manner, a divorce was arranged and carried to its completion in the early summer of 1803. On the 2d June of the same year Schelling and Caroline, after a visit to the former’s father, were married, and with the marriage Schelling’s life at Jena came to an end. It was full time, for Schelling’s undoubtedly overweening self-confidence and most arrogant mode of criticism had involved him in a series of virulent disputes and quarrels at Jena, the details of which are in themselves of little or no interest, but are valuable as illustrations of the evil qualities in Schelling’s nature which deface much of his philosophic work. The boiling fervour which the Romanticists prized is deplorably ineffective in the clear cold atmosphere of speculation.

A fresh field was found in the newly-constituted university of Würzburg, to which he was called in September 1803 as professor of “Naturphilosophie,” and where he remained till April 1806, when the Napoleonic conquests compelled a change. The published writings of this period (Philosophie und Religion, 1804, and Ueber das Verhältniss des Realen und Idealen in der Natur, 1806), and still more the unpublished draft of his lectures as continued in volumes v. and vi. of the Sämmtliche Werke, exhibit an important internal change in his philosophic views, a change which was accentuated by the open breach on the one hand with Fichte and on the other hand with Hegel. Schelling’s little pamphlet Darlegung des wahren . Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie zur verbesserten Fichtischen Lehre was the natural sequel to the difference which had brought the correspondence of the former friends to a close in 1803, and to Fichte’s open condemnation in the Grundzüge d. gegenwärt. Zeitalters. Hegel’s preface to the Phänomenologie des Geistes was in like manner the sequel to the severe treatment which in his Jena lectures he had bestowed on the emptiness of the Schellingian method, and with the appearance of that work correspondence and friendship between the two ceased, and in Schelling’s mind there remained a deeply rooted sense of injury and injustice.

The Würzburg professoriate had not been without its inner trials. Schelling had many enemies, and his irreconcilable and lofty tone of dealing with them only increased the virulence of their attacks. He embroiled himself with his colleagues and with the Government, so that it was doubtless with a sense of relief that he found external events bring his tenure of the chair to a close. In Munich, to which with his wife he removed in 1806, he found a long and quiet residence. A position as state official, at first as associate of the academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical section of the academy of sciences, gave him ease and leisure, without resigning his official position he lectured for a short time at Stuttgart, and during seven years at Erlangen (1820-27). In 1809 Caroline died, and three years later Schelling married one of her closest, most attached friends, Pauline Gotter, in whom he found a true and faithful companion.

During the long stay at Munich (1806-1841) Schelling’s literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The “Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie” contained in the Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806-8) are for the most part extracts from the Würzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn forth by the special incident of Jacobi’s work. The only writing of significance is the “Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,” which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften, vol. i. (1809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to mysticism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophie und Religion. In 1815 appeared the tract Ueber die Gottheiten zu Sarnothrake, ostensibly a portion of the great work, Die Weltalter, on which Schelling was understood to be engaged, a work frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which no great part was ever written. Probably it was the overpowering strength and influence of the Hegelian system that constrained Schelling to so long a silence, for it was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a preface to a translation by H. Beckers of a work by Cousin, he gave public utterance to the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian and to his own earlier conceptions of philosophy. The antagonism certainly was not then a new fact; the Erlangen lectures on the history of philosophy (Sämmt. Werke, x. 124-5) of 1822 express the same in a pointed fashion, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true positive complement to the negative of logical or speculative philosophy. Public attention, which had been from time to time drawn to Schelling’s prolonged silence, was powerfully attracted by these vague hints of a new system which promised something more positive, as regards religion in particular, than the apparent results of Hegel’s teaching. For the appearance of the critical writings of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Bauer, and the evident disunion in the Hegelian school itself, had alienated the sympathies of many from the then dominant philosophy. In Berlin particularly, the headquarters of the Hegelians, the desire found expression to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system which he was understood to have in reserve. The realization of the desire did not come about till 1841, when the appointment of Schelling as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university. The opening lecture of his course was listened to by a large and most appreciative audience; and thus, in the evening of his career, Schelling found himself, as often before, the centre of attraction in the world of philosophy. The enmity of his old foe H. E. G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling’s apparent success, led to the surreptitious publication of a verbatim report of the lectures on the philosophy of revelation, and, as Schelling did not succeed in obtaining legal condemnation and suppression of this piracy, he in 1845 ceased the delivery of any public courses. No authentic information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death in 1854, when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures :—vol. i., Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii., Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv., Philosophy of Revelation (1858).

Whatever judgment one may form of the total worth of Schelling as a philosopher, his place in the history of that important movement called generally German philosophy is unmistakable and assured. It happened to him, as he himself claimed, to turn a page in the history of thought, and one cannot ignore the actual advance upon his predecessor achieved by him or the brilliant fertility of the genius by which that achievement was accomplished. On the other hand it is not to be denied that Schelling, to whom an unusually long period of activity was accorded, nowhere succeeds in attaining the rounded completeness of scientific system. His philosophical writings, extended over more than half a century, lie before us, not as parts of one whole, but as the successive manifestations of a restless highly endowed spirit, striving continuously but unsuccessfully after a solution of its own problems. Such unity as they possess is a unity of tendency and endeavour; they are not parts of a whole, and in some respects the final form they assumed is the least satisfactory of all. Hence it has come about that Schelling remains for the philosophic student but a moment of historical value in the development of thought, and that his works have for the most part ceased now to have more than historic interest. Throughout his thinking bears the painful impress of hurry, incompleteness, and spasmodic striving after an ideal which could only be attained by patient, laborious, and methodic effort. Brilliant contributions there are without doubt to the evolution of a philosophic idea, but no systematic fusion of all into a whole. It is not unfair to connect the apparent failings of Schelling’s philosophizing with the very nature of the thinker and with the historical accidents of his career. In the writings of his early manhood, for example, more particularly those making up Naturphilosophie, one finds in painful abundance the evidences of hastily-acquired knowledge, impatience of the hard labour of minute thought, over-confidence in the force of individual genius, and desire instantaneously to present even in crudest fashion the newest idea that has dawned upon the thinker. Schelling was prematurely thrust into the position of a foremost productive thinker; and when the lengthened period of quiet meditation was at last forced upon him there unfortunately lay before him a system which achieved what had dimly been involved in his ardent and impetuous desires. It is not possible to acquit Schelling of a certain disingenuousness in regard to the Hegelian philosophy; and if we claim for him perfect disinterestedness of view we can do so only by imposing on him the severer condemnation of deficient insight.

It was a natural concomitant of this continuous hurry under which Schelling’s successive efforts at constructive work were carried out that he should have been found at all stages supporting himself by calling to his aid the forms of some other system. The successive phases of his development might without injustice be characterized by reference to these external supports. Thus Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the Mystics, and finally, the great Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give respectively colouring to particular works in which Schelling unfolds himself. At the same time it would be unjust to represent Schelling as merely borrowing from these external sources. There must be allowed to him genuine philosophic spirit and no small measure of philosophic insight. Of the philosophic afflatus he was in no want; and it might be fairly added that, under all the differences of exposition which seem to constitute so many differing Schellingian systems, there is one and the same philosophic effort and spirit. But what Schelling did want was power to work out scientifically, methodically, the ideas with which his spirit was filled and mastered. Hence he could only find expression for himself in forms of this or that earlier philosophy, and hence too the frequent formlessness of his own thought, the tendency to relapse into mere impatient despair of ever finding an adequate vehicle for transmitting thought.

It is thus, moreover, a matter of indifference how one distributes or classifies the several forms and periods of Schelling’s philosophic activity. Whether one adopts as basis the external form, i.e., the foreign mode of speculation laid under contribution, or endeavours to adhere closely to inner differences of view, the result is very much the same. There is one line of speculative thought, in the development of which inevitable problems call for new methods of handling, while the results only in part can claim to have a place accorded to them in the history of philosophy. It is fair in dealing with Schelling’s development to take into account the indications of his own opinion regarding its more significant momenta. In his own view the turning points seem to have been —(1) the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature,—the advance, in other words, to Naturphilosophie ; (2) the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, viz., the thought of the identical, indifferent, absolute substratum of both nature...