He states his problems very clearly; the romantic character consists in the treatment and the solution. Whilst the natural scientist lives in the midst of nature as in the immediate presence of reality, the philosopher of nature inquires how it is possible to know nature: " How nature and the experience of it is possible, this is the problem with which philosophy arose." Or as it has also been expressed: "The phenomenality of sensibility is the borderland of all empirical phenomena." (Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799.) This setting of the problem recalls the observation of Hobbes, namely, that the most remarkable of all phenomena is the fact that phenomena do exist. The realist and the romanticist agree in the statement of the problem, however widely they differ in their respective solutions. Schelling wishes to explain nature from the viewpoint of mind and thus substitute a new science instead of the natural science founded by Galileo and Newton. The natural scientist cannot explain how nature can be known. The natural philosopher explains it by construing nature as unconscious mind. Fichte had even distinguished a twofold tendency in consciousness: an infinite, unconditioned activity (the pure ego) and limitation (by the non-ego). Hence if there is to be any possible way of understanding the origin of mind from the forces of nature, it follows that these two tendencies must already be manifest in nature, only in lower degrees, or, as Schelling puts it, in lower potentialities. And since nature differs from mind only as a matter of degree, in which the tension of those tendencies, the polarity of opposites, as Schelling calls them, is manifested, it follows that the various phenomena of nature likewise show only quantitative differences.
