Schelling sought also to furnish himself with a new method for knowing the absolute identity. Neither the analytic nor the synthetical method seems to him suitable for this, since both are only a finite knowledge. Gradually, also, he abandoned the mathematical method. The logical forms of the ordinary method of knowledge, and even the ordinary metaphysical categories, were now insufficient for him. Schelling now places the intellectual intuition as the starting point of true knowledge. Intuition, in general, is an equal positing of thought and being. When I behold an object, the being of the object and my thought of the object is for me absolutely the same. But in the ordinary intuition, some separate sensible being is posited as one with the thought. But in the intellectual or rational intuition, being in general, and every being is made identical with the thought, and the absolute _subject-object_ is beheld. The intellectual intuition is absolute knowledge, and as such it can only be conceived as that in which thought and being are not opposed to each other. It is the beginning and the first step towards philosophy to behold, immediately and intellectually within thyself, that same indifference of the ideal and the real which thou beholdest projected as it were from thyself in space and time. This absolutely absolute mode of knowledge is wholly and entirely in the absolute itself. That it can never become taught is clear. It cannot, moreover, be seen why philosophy is bound to have special regard to the unattainable. It seems much more fitting to make so complete a separation on every side between the entrance to philosophy and the common knowledge, that no road nor track shall lead from the latter to the former. The absolute mode of knowledge, like the truth which it contains, has no true opposition outside of itself, and as it cannot be demonstrated by any intelligent being, so nothing can be set up in opposition to it by any.—Schelling has attempted to bring the intellectual intuition into a method, and has named this method construction. The possibility and the necessity of the constructive method is based upon the fact that the absolute is in all, and that all is the absolute. Construction is nothing other than the proving that the whole is absolutely expressed in every particular relation and object. To construe an object, philosophically, is to prove that in this object the whole inner structure of the absolute repeats itself.