[Footnote 1: He held posts of large general superintendence over church and school affairs at Weimar.]
[Footnote 2: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.]
[Footnote 4: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.]
What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,' says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in which it appears immersed,--to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty, and to set it in free process of evolution: it means, in other words, to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view which sees in Nature only occurrences, or at the best sees the action _as a fact, not the action itself_ in the action[1].' There is in short a process in nature parallel in character to what Fichte had exhibited for consciousness. The natural world is no longer subordinated, but to appearance co-ordinate: and evolution or development, exhibited under the logical title of a 'deduction,' is the common law of both. The real order and the ideal order of the world are equally the work of an infinite and unconditioned activity, 'which never quite exhausts itself in any finite product, and of which everything individual is only as it were a particular expression.' The nature which we see broken up in groups and masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as a series of steps in a process of development: the steps in a single continuous product which has been arrested at several stages,--which presents distinct epochs, but nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to a single original ideal.
In Nature, as in Mind, the most typical phenomenon is an original heterogeneity, duplicity, or difference, which, however, points back to a still more fundamental homogeneity, unity, or identity. This primary unity or ground of unification does not indeed appear to sight; the 'soul of Nature,' the _anima mundi,_ nowhere presents itself as such in its undivided simplicity; but only as the perpetually recurring re-union of what has been divided. But though unapparent, the absolute identity is the necessary presupposition of all life and existence, as of all knowledge and action. It is the link or 'copula' which perpetually reduces the antithesis to unity, and the heterogeneity to homogeneity, and the different to redintegration. To this fact of antithesis, presupposing and continually reverting to an original unity, Schelling gives the name 'Polarity,' 'It is impossible to construe the main physical phenomena without such a conflict of opposite principles. But this conflict only exists at the instant of the phenomenon itself. Each natural force _awakes_ its opposite. But that force has no independent existence: it only exists in this contest, and it is only this contest which gives it for the moment a separate existence. As soon as this contest ceases, the force vanishes, by retreating into the sphere of homogeneous forces[2].' Polarity, therefore, is a general law of the cosmos.