Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/413

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SCHELLING 391 tunately involved, while a severe blow to both, drew them much more closely together, and in the following year, A. W. Schlegel having removed to Berlin, and Caroline remaining in Jena, affairs so developed themselves that quietly, amicably, and in apparently the most friendly manner, a divorce was arranged and carried to its comple- tion in the early summer of 1803. On the 2d June of the same year Schelling and Caroline, after a visit to the former's father, were married, and with the marriage Schelling's life at Jena came to an end. It was full time, for Schelling's undoubtedly overweening self-confidence and most arrogant mode of criticism had involved him in a series of virulent disputes and quarrels at Jena, the details of which are in themselves of little or no interest, but are valuable as illustrations of the evil qualities in Schelling's nature which deface much of his philosophic work. The boiling fervour which the Romanticists prized is deplorably ineffective in the clear cold atmosphere of speculation. A fresh field was found in the newly-constituted uni- versity of Wiirzburg, to which he was called in September 1803 as professor of " Naturphilosophie," and where he remained till April 1806, when the Napoleonic conquests compelled a change. The published writings of this period (Philosophic und Religion, 1804, and Ueber das Ver- hdltniss des Realen und Idealen in der Natur, 1806), and still more the unpublished draft of his lectures as con- tinued in volumes v. and vi. of the Sammtliche Werke, exhibit an important internal change in his philosophic views, a change which was accentuated by the open breach on the one hand with Fichte and on the other hand with Hegel. Schelling's little pamphlet Darlegung des wahren Verhiiltnisses der Naturphilosophie zur verbesserten Ficht- ischen Lehre was the natural sequel to the difference which had brought the correspondence of the former friends to a close in 1803, and to Fichte's open condemnation in the Grundziige d. gegenwdrt. Zeitalters. Hegel's preface to the Phcinomenologie des Geistes was in like manner the sequel to the severe treatment which in his Jena lectures he had bestowed on the emptiness of the Schellingian method, and with the appearance of that work correspond- ence and friendship between the two ceased, and in Schelling's mind there remained a deeply rooted sense of injury and injustice. The Wiirzburg professoriate had not been without its inner trials. Schelling had many enemies, and his irre- concilable and lofty tone of dealing with them only increased the virulence of their attacks. He embroiled himself with his colleagues and with the Government, so that it was doubtless with a sense of relief that he found external events bring his tenure of the chair to a close. In Munich, to which with his wife he removed in 1806, he found a long and quiet residence. A position as state official, at first as associate of the academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical section of the academy of sciences, gave him ease and leisure. Without resigning his official position he lectured for a short time at Stutt- gart, and during seven years at Erlangen (1820-27). In 1809 Caroline died, and three years later Schelling married one of her closest, most attached friends, Pauline Gotter, in whom he found a true and faithful companion. During the long stay at Munich (1806-1841) Schel- ling's literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The "Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie" con- tained in the Jahrbucher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806-8) are for the most part extracts from the Wiirz- burg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den gdttlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn forth by the special incident of Jacobi's work. The only writing of significance is the " Philosophische Untersuchungen iiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit," which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften, vol. i. (1809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to mysticism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophic und Religion. In 1815 appeared the tract Ueber die Gottheiten zu Samo- thrake, ostensibly a portion of the great work, Die Weltalter, on which Schelling was understood to be engaged, a work frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which no great part was ever written. Probably it was the overpowering strength and influence of the Hegelian system that constrained Schelling to so long a silence, for it was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a preface to a translation by H. Beckers of a work by Cousin, he gave public utterance to the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian and to his own earlier conceptions of philosophy. The antagonism certainly was not then a new fact; the Erlangen lectures on the history of philosophy (Sdmmt. Werke, x. 124-5) of 1822 express the same in a pointed fashion, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true positive complement to the negative of logical or speculative philosophy. Public attention, which had been from time to time drawn to Schelling's prolonged silence, was powerfully attracted by these vague hints of a new system which promised something more positive, as regards religion in particular, than the apparent results of Hegel's teaching. For the appearance of the critical writings of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Bauer, and the evident disunion in the Hegelian school itself, had alienated the sympathies of many from the then dominant philosophy. In Berlin particularly, the headquarters of the Hegelians, the desire found expression to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system which he was understood to have in reserve. The realiza- tion of the desire did not come about till 1841, when the appointment of Schelling as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university. The opening lecture of his course was listened to by a large and most appreciative audience; and thus, in the evening of his career, Schelling found himself, as often before, the centre of attraction in the world of philosophy. The enmity of his old foe H. E. G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling's apparent success, led to the surreptitious publication of a verbatim report of the lectures on the philosophy of revelation, and, as Schelling did not succeed in obtaining legal condemnation and sup- pression of this piracy, he in 1845 ceased the delivery of any public courses. No authentic information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death in 1854, when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures : vol. i., Introduction to the Philosophy of Mytho- logy (1856); ii., Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv., Philosophy of Revelation* (1858). Whatever judgment one may form of the total worth of Schelling as a philosopher, his place in the history of that, important move- ment called generally German philosophy is unmistakable and assured. It happened to him, as he himself claimed, to turn a page in the history of thought, and one cannot ignore the actual advance upon his predecessor achieved by him or the brilliant fertility of the genius by which that achievement was accomplished. On the other hand it is not to be denied that Schelling, to whom an unusually long period of activity was accorded, nowhere succeeds in attaining the rounded completeness of scientific system. His philosophical writings, extended over more than half a century, lie before us, not as parts of one whole, but as the successive mani- festations of a restless highly endowed spirit, striving continuously but unsuccessfully after a solution of its own problems. Such unity as they possess is a unity of tendency and endeavour ; they are not parts of a whole, and in some respects the final form they assumed is the least satisfactory of all. Hence it has come about