But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was a certain excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn attacks down by an abnormal subjectivity which would fain reform the surroundings wherever he went. Schelling stood more apart--animated by an immense curiosity, a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but withal he seemed not to have his heart, deeply set and pledged to a distinctively human interest. His first love is the Romance in nature; and when he turns to history it is by preference to ages far remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it achieve its work by the instrumentality of Art. Religion seems to culminate for him in a mythology. Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat of a disease--whence philosophy is to carry us--almost magically if possible--to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an instrument towards a great end--and that end a godlike, even if you like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy, in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy--at least as Hegel understood it--is merely neither: but the life, which never can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. And so Schelling could not earn the confidence which only goes to those who are felt to be fellow-fighters with those they lead.
With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main current of philosophy, of streams of idea and research which had already exercised a stimulative effect on the tone and products of the higher literature of Germany. As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the English and Scotch 'empiricists' shake him out of his 'rationalist' dogmatism) Lessing--in a couple of pages _On the reality of things outside God_--threw doubts on the tenability of the ordinary deistic arrangement of his day, which set God _there_ and man and his surroundings _here,_ each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of Spinoza, and Spinoza by the light of Leibniz: and, if he emphasised the absolute right to the completest individual self-development on one hand, he no less declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is insulated, nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences.' 'I thank the Creator that I must,--must the best,' he adds (1774). Of his conversations on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either decried, or--what is worse--misunderstood, by the established masters of instruction, they were welcomed by a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of thought.