With this theosophic view of the world, Schelling was led to pay attention to the earlier mystics. He began to study their writings. He answered the charge of mysticism in his controversy with Fichte as follows:—Among the learned of the last century, there was a tacit agreement never to go beyond a certain height, and, therefore, the genuine spirit of science was given up to the unlearned. These, because they were uneducated and had drawn upon themselves the jealousy of the learned, were called fanatics. But many a philosopher by profession might well have exchanged all his rhetoric for the fulness of mind and heart which abound in the writings of such fanatics. Therefore I am not ashamed of the name of such a fanatic. I will even seek to make this reproach true; if I have not hitherto studied the writings of these men correctly, it has been owing to negligence.
Schelling did not omit to verify these words. There were some special mental affinities between himself and _Jacob Boehme_, with whom he now became more and more closely joined. A study of his writings is indeed indicated in Schelling’s works of the present period. One of the most famous of Schelling’s writings, his theory of freedom, which appeared after this (“_Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit_,” 1809), is composed entirely in the spirit of Jacob Boehme. We begin with it a new period of Schelling’s philosophizing, where _the will_ is affirmed as the essence of God, and we have thus a new definition of the absolute differing from every previous one.
V. FIFTH PERIOD:—ATTEMPT AT A THEOGONY AND COSMOGONY AFTER THE MANNER OF JACOB BOEHME.