Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806). Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1806) is likewise of vast importance on account of the incisive polemics against the eighteenth century as “the age of enlightenment and impoverishment” (Auf- und Ausklärung). Here we find a clear statement of the antithesis which was later (in the school of St. Simon) described as the antithesis between the organic and critical age.
2. Friedrich William Schelling (1775-1854) is the typical philosopher of Romanticism. Having no critical prejudices whatever, in this youthful treatises which constitute the exclusive basis of his philosophical significance, he proclaims a new science which is intended to transcend all the antitheses still confronting the traditional science. He labored first at Jena, afterwards at Stuttgart, Munich and Erlangen. His youth was characterized by great productiveness, which was however followed by a remarkable period of stagnation in his productivity. After the death of Hegel, when nearly seventy, he was called to Berlin by Frederick William IV, for the purpose of counteracting the radical tendencies arising from the Hegelian philosophy. His lectures at Berlin, which had aroused great anticipations, were however a complete disappointment.
a. Schelling began his philosophical career as a collaborator of Fichte. His first essays constitute a further development of the Fichtean science of knowledge. But he could not accept the subordinate position ascribed to nature in Fichte’s philosophy (as mere limitation and means). He undertakes to show in his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) and in various essays in natural philosophy, that it is impossible that nature should assume such a mechanical relation to mental life.
