Critique of the Latest Attempt of Reaction 
Against the Free Philosophy 

191 

For a decade there hung on the mountains of South Germany a 
thundercloud which gathered in ever darker menace against 
North-German philosophy. Schelling appeared again in Munich; it 
was understood that his new system was approaching completion 
and would oppose the domination of the Hegelian school. He 
himself spoke out resolutely against that school, and its other 
opponents, when all arguments had to give way before its 
conquering might, still had the resort of pointing to Schelling as 
the man who would ultimately demolish it. 

Hence Hegel’s disciples must have welcomed Schelling’s arrival 
in Berlin six months ago and his promise to submit to the public 
verdict his by then completed system. One could hope no longer 
to have to hear the irksome, empty chatter about him, the great 
unknown, and to see at last what there was in it. Besides, with the 
fighting spirit which has always distinguished it and the self-confi- 
dence it possessed, the Hegelian school could only welcome the 
opportunity to try its strength with a famous opponent; Schelling 
had, indeed, long ago been challenged by Gans, Michelet and the 
Athenium, and his younger pupils by the Deutsche Jahrbticher. 

So the thundercloud came up and discharged itself in thunder 
and lightning which from Schelling’s rostrum began to excite all 
Berlin. Now the thunder has died away, the lightning has ceased; 
has it found its target, is the structure of the Hegelian system, that 
proud palace of thought, going up in flames, are the Hegelians 
hastening to save what can still be saved? So far nobody has 
witnessed anything of the kind. 

And yet everything had been expected of Schelling. Had not the 
“Positives” been down on their knees groaning about the great 
drought in the land of the Lord and imploring that the rain cloud 
hanging on the far horizon might draw nearer? Was it not just as 
of old in Israel, when Elijah was entreated to drive out the then 
priests of Baal?* And when at last he came, the great exorcist, how 
all the loud, shameless denunciation, all the wild raging and 
shouting, suddenly ceased so that not a word of the new revelation 
should be lost! How the valiant heroes of the Evangelische and the 
Allgemeine Berliner Kirchenzeitung,” of the Literarischer Anzeiger and 
Fichte’s magazine‘ drew back modestly to make room for the St. 
George who was to slay the dreadful dragon of Hegelianism, 
which breathed the fire of godlessness and the smoke of obscura- 
tion! Was there not a silence in the land as if the Holy Ghost was 
about to descend, as if God Himself wished to speak out of the 
clouds? 

And when the philosophical Messiah mounted his wooden, very 
poorly upholstered throne in the Auditorium maximum, when he 
promised deeds of faith and miracles of revelation, what jubilant 
cries greeted him from the camp of the Positives! How all tongues 
were full of him in whom the “Christians” had placed their hopes! 
Was it not said that the bold hero would venture alone like Roland 
into enemy territory, plant his banner in the heart of enemy 
country, blast the innermost citadel of wickedness, the uncon- 
quered fastness of the Idea, so that the enemies, left without base 
or centre, could no longer find counsel or any place of safety in 
their own country? Was it not proclaimed that the fall of 
Hegelianism, the death of all atheists and non-Christians, was to 
be expected by Easter 1842? 

Everything has turned out differently. The Hegelian philosophy 
lives on, on the rostrum, in literature, in the young; it knows that 
all the blows dealt it up to now could do it no harm and calmly 
proceeds on its own course of inner development. Its influence on 
the nation, as proved if only by the increased rage and activity of 
its opponents, is rapidly growing, and Schelling has left almost all 
his hearers dissatisfied. 

These are facts which not even the few adherents of the new 
Schellingian wisdom will be able to dispute with valid arguments. 
When the prejudices formed against Schelling were found to be 

* 1 Kings 18.— Ed. 
> Berliner Aligemeine Kirchenzeitung — Ed. 
. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie, edited by Fichte Jr — Ed. 

Shelling 

and die 

OHffeubarung. 

Rritik 
ves neteften Reaktionsveciuds 

gegen die 

freie Pbhilofopbie. 

Leipzig, 
Robkhert Binder. 
1842. 

Title-page of Engels’ pamphlet Schelling and Revelation 

Schelling and Revelation 195 

all too fully confirmed, there was at first embarrassment as to how 
reverence for the old master of science should be reconciled with 
that trank, resolute rejection of his claims that was owed to Hegel. 
He soon helped us out of this dilemma, however, when he 
expressed himself on Hegel in a manner which released us from 
all consideration for the alleged successor and conqueror. 1t will 
therefore not be taken amiss if in my judgment I follow a 
democratic principle and without regard to persons confine myself 
to the matter and its history. 

When in 1831 the dying Hegei left the legacy of his system to 
his disciples, their number was still relatively small. The system 
only existed in that no doubt strict and rigid, but also solid torm 
which has since been much criticised but was nothing less than a 
necessity. Hegel himself, proudly confident in the strength of the 
Idea, had done little to popularise his doctrine. The writings he 
had published were all couched in a rigorously scientific, almost 
thorny style, and, like the Jahrbticher für wissenschaftliche Krittk, in 
which his pupils wrote after the same fashion, could count on only 
a small, and moreover preoccupied, public of scholars. The 
language did not need to be ashamed of the scars received in the 
struggle with thought; what was first required was to reject 
decidedly everything imaginary, fantastic, and emotional, and to 
grasp the pure thought in its self-creation. Once this secure base 
of operations had been achieved, it was possible to await in calm a 
subsequent reaction of the excluded elements and even descend 
into unphilosophic consciousness, since the rear was covered. The 
iniluence of Hegel’s lectures always remained limited to a small 
circle, and although its importance there was great, it could bear 
fruit only in later years. 

But it was only after Hegel had died that his philosophy really 
began to live. The publication of his collected works, particularly 
the lectures’? had an immeasurable effect. New doors were 
opened to the wonderful hidden treasure which lay in the secret 
depths of the earth and of whose splendour only a few had yet 
caught the gleam. Small had been the number of those who had 
had the courage to venture on their own into the labyrinth of its 
approaches; now there was a straight, smooth road by which the 
fabulous jewel could be reached. At the same time, coming from 
the lips of Hegel’s pupils, the teaching assumed a clearer, more 
human form, the opposition on the part of philosophy itself 
became weaker and less significant, and by and by only the most 
hidebound theologians and jurists were heard to complain about 
the impertinence with which a layman was intruding into their 

special field of learning. Youth seized upon the new offering the 
more eagerly as in the school itself an advance had meanwhile 
taken place which urged on to the most meaningful discussions on 
vital questions both of science and of practice. 

The limits within which Hegel himself had confined the power- 
ful, youthfully impetuous flood of conclusions from his teaching 
were conditioned partly by his time, partly by his personality. In 
its fundamentals Hegel’s system had been completed before 1810, 
his world outlook by 1820. His political views, his teaching on the 
state, which had been developed in reference to England, bear 
unmistakably the stamp of the Restoration, nor did the world- 
historical necessity of the July revolution ever become clear to him. 
Hence he himself came under his own pronouncement that every 
philosophy is but the thought content of its own time. His 
personal opinions, on the other hand, were no doubt clarified by 
his system, but not without influencing its conclusions. Thus his 
philosophy of religion and of law would undoubtedly have turned 
out very differently if he had abstracted himself more from the 
positive elements which were present in him as a product of his 
time, and had proceeded instead from pure thought. All inconsis- 
tencies and contradictions in Hegel can be reduced to that. 
Everything which in the philosophy of religion appears too 
orthodox, and in the philosophy of law too pseudo-historical, is to 
be understood from this point of view. The principles are 
throughout independent and free-minded, the conclusions—no 
one denies it— sometimes cautious, even illiberal. Now some of his 
pupils appeared on the scene who kept to the principles and 
rejected the conclusions where they could not be justified. The 
Left wing took form; Ruge created an organ for it in the Hallische 
Jahrbticher, and overnight the abolition of the sovereignty of the 
positive was proclaimed. But one did not yet dare to express 
openly all the conclusions. Even after Strauss one still believed 
oneself to be within the Christian fold, indeed, in relation to the 
Jews, one even prided oneself on one’s Christianity; on such 
questions as the personality of God or the immortality of the 
individual one was not sufficiently clear to be able to pronounce 
an unreserved judgment; indeed, when one saw the inevitable 
conclusions approaching, one was even in doubt whether the new 
teaching should not remain the esoteric property of the school and 
be kept secret from the nation. Then Leo came out with his Die 
Hegelingen and thereby did his opponents the greatest service; and 
indeed, everything that was intended to bring about the ruin of 
this school worked to its advantage and proved to it most clearly 

Schelling and Revelation 197 

that it was walking hand in hand with the world spirit. Leo gave 
the Hegelings clarity about themselves, he reawakened in them the 
proud courage which follows truth to its most extreme conclusions 
and declares it openly and intelligibly, be the consequences what 
they may. It is amusing now to read what was then published in 
defence against Leo, to see how the poor Hegelings struggled and 
protested and hedged themselves with reservations against Leo’s 
conclusions. Today not one of them thinks of denying his charges, 
so high has their audacity risen these past three years. Feuerbach’s 
Wesen des Christenthums, Strauss’ Dogmatik? and the Deutsche 
Jahrbticher show the fruits of Leo’s denunciation; nay, Die Posaune 
demonstrates the relevant conclusions even in Hegel. This book is 
so important for Hegel’s position if only because it shows how 
often the bold, independent thinker in Hegel prevailed over the 
professor who was subject to a thousand influences. It is a 
vindication of the personality of the man of whom it was expected 
that he should transcend his time not only where he had genius 
but even where he had not. Here is the proof that he did this too. 

So the “hegelingische Rotte”* no longer conceals that it neither 
can nor will any longer regard Christianity as its limit. All the basic 
principles of Christianity, and even of what has hitherto been 
called religion itself, have fallen before the inexorable criticism of 
reason, the absolute idea claims to be the founder of a new era. 
The great upheaval of which the French philosophers of the last 
century were merely the forerunners has achieved in the realm of 
thought its completion, its self-creation. The philosophy of Protes- 
tantism since Descartes has come to an end; a new era has begun, 
and it is the most sacred duty of all who have followed the 
self-development of the spirit to transmit the immense result to 
the consciousness of the nation and to raise it to Germany’s living 
principle. 

During this internal development of the Hegelian philosophy, its 
external position did not remain unchanged either. Altenstein, the 
Minister through whose mediation the new doctrine had found a 
cradle in Prussia, died; with the subsequent changes, not only did 
the doctrine cease to be favoured in any way, endeavours were 
also made gradually to exclude it from the state. This was the 
consequence of the greater emphasis on principles both by the 

* The main section of D. F. Strauss’ Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer 
geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft. Ed. 
EAB. Bauer,}] Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts tiber Hegel den Atheisten und 
Antichristen. Ein Ultimatum.— Ed. 
© Hegelian gang.— Ed. 

state and by philosophy; as the latter was not afraid to express 
what was necessary, so the former, quite naturally, insisted more 
definitely on its own conclusions. Prussia is a Christian-monarchic 
state and its position in world history entitles it to have its 
principles recognised as valid in fact. One may share them or not, 
it is enough that they are there, and Prussia is strong enough to 
defend them if need be. Moreover, the Hegelian philosophy has 
no cause for complaint on that score. Its former position threw a 
false light upon it and apparently attracted to it a number of 
adherents who could not be relied on in times of struggle. Its false 
friends, the egoists, the superficial, the half-hearted, the unfree, 
have now fortunately withdrawn and it now knows how it stands 
and on whom it can count. Besides, it can only welcome a 
sharpening of the contradictions, since its final victory is assured. 
So it was quite natural that men of the opposite trend were 
summoned as a counterweight to the hitherto dominant tenden- 
cies. The struggle against these was taken up again, and when the 
historical-positive faction had again found some courage, Schelling 
was called to Berlin to turn the scales in the struggle and to ban 
the Hegelian teaching from its own field of philosophy. 

His appearance in Berlin was bound to arouse general excite- 
ment. He had played so prominent a role in the history of modern 
philosophy; in spite of all the stimulation he had given, he had 
never produced a tinished system and had put off his settlement 
with science time and again, until he had now promised to give 
this great account of his entire life’s work. And he really did 
undertake to achieve the reconciliation of faith and science, of 
philosophy and revelation, and everything else he had mentioned 
in his first lecture* A further important source of heightened 
interest in him was the relation in which he stood to the man he 
had come to conquer. Already friends and roommates at the 
University, the two men later lived together in Jena in such 
intimacy that to this day it cannot be decided what influence they 
had on each other. One thing alone is certain, that it was Hegel 
who made Schelling realise how far he had already gone beyond 
Fichte without knowing it.* After their separation, however, their 

* If Schelling really is as “straightforward and frank” as he claims, if he is 
sincere in his assertions about Hegel and has good: reasons for them, he should 
prove it by publishing his correspondence with Hegel, which is said to be in his 
possession, or at least the publicanon of which depends only on him. But that is the 

tender spot. If he demands belief in his sincerity, let him come forward with this 
proof which would end all arguments on the issue— Note by Engels. 

 Schelling’s erste Vorlesung in Berlin, 15. November 1841.— Ed. 

Schelling and Revelation 199 

paths of development, which until then had been parallel, soon 
began to part. Hegel, whose profound, restless dialectic only now 
began freely to develop after Schelling’s influence had receded, 
made in 1806 with the Phdnomenologie des Geistes a giant step 
beyond the standpoint of natural philosophy and declared his 
independence of it; Schelling despaired more and more of the 
possibility of achieving the great results he desired by the method 
hitherto followed and already at that time attempted to master the 
absolute directly by empirical assumption of a higher revelation. 
While Hegel’s thought-creating power proved itself increasingly 
energetic, lively and active, Schelling, as is already evidenced by 
his making such an assumption, sank into an inert lassitude which 
soon became outwardly manifest in the slackening of his literary 
activity. He may well talk complacently now about his long, secret 
philosophical labours, about the hidden treasures in his desk, 
about his thirty years’ war with thought, nobody will believe him. 
He who concentrates the entire effort of his mind on a single 
point, who still lays claim to the youthful vigour which overcame a 
Fichte, and wants to be a hero of science, a genius of the first 
order—and only such a one would be able to overthrow Hegel, as 
everybody must admit— would he need thirty years and more to 
produce a few insignificant results? If Schelling had not taken 
philosophising so lightly, would not all the stages in the develop- 
ment of his thought lie before the world in separate writings? 
After all, he never showed much self-control in this regard, and 
used to send at once anything new he found into the world 
without much criticism. If he still felt himself to be the king of 
science, how could he live without the recognition of his people, 
how could the miserable existence of a dethroned prince, a 
Charles X, how could the long since worn and faded purple of the 
philosophy of identity satisfy him? Should he not have dared 
everything to reinstate himself in his lost rights, to reconquer the 
throne of which a “later comer”* had deprived him? Instead, he 
left the road of pure thought, buried himself in mythological and 
theosophical fantasies and kept his system at the disposal, as it 
would appear, of the King of Prussia, for at his call the never 
completed was at once ready. So he came here, with the reconcilia- 
tion of faith and knowledge in his bag, got himself talked about 
and at last mounted the rostrum. And what was the New he 
brought, the Unheard-of with which he wanted to work wonders? 

* An allusion to F. Schiller, Die Piccolomini, Act I, Scene 1.— Ed. 
> Frederick William IV.— Ed. 

The philosophy of revelation, on which he had lectured in Munich 
“since 1831 in exactly the same way”, and the philosophy of 
mythology, which “dates from even earlier”. Quite old things 
which had been proclaimed in Munich for ten years without 
success, which could captivate only a Ringseis or a Stahl. That is 
what Schelling calls his “system”! There lie the forces which are to 
save the world, the anathema against godlessness—in the seed 
which refused to germinate in Munich! As these lectures have 
been ready for ten years, why did Schelling not have them 
printed? With all his self-assurance and confidence in success there 
must be something behind this, some secret doubt must be 
keeping him from this step. 

In appearing before the Berlin audience, he did indeed come a 
little closer to the public than up to now in Munich. What could 
there easily remain an esoteric secret teaching because nobody 
bothered about it, is here mercilessly forced into the light of day. 
Nobody is admitted to heaven before he has gone through the 
purgatory of criticism. Anything remarkable that is said in the 
University here today appears tomorrow in all German newspa- 
pers. Hence all the reasons which kept Schelling from having his 
lectures printed should have held him back also from moving to 
Berlin. Even more so, for the printed word admits no misunder- 
standing, while the carelessly spoken word, hastily taken down and 
perhaps only half heard, is indeed exposed to false interpretations. 
But, of course, there was now nothing else for it; he had to go to 
Berlin or by his action admit his inability to defeat Hegelianism. It 
was now also too late to go into print, for he had to bring to 
Berlin something new, not yet printed, and his manner here 
showed that he did not have anything else “in his desk”. 

So he confidently mounted the rostrum, and immediately 
promising his hearers the most tremendous things, he began his 
lectures before almost four hundred people, of all social positions 
and nations.* Of these I shall now report, on the basis of my 
own notes, which I have compared with the most accurate of 
other available records, whatever is necessary to justify my judg- 
ment. 

Up to now, all philosophy has made it its task to understand the 
world as reasonable. What is reasonable is, of course, also 
necessary, and what is necessary must be, or at least become, real. 
This is the bridge to the great practical results of modern 
philosophy. If Schelling now does not acknowledge these results, it 

* See this volume, pp. 181-82.— Ed. 

Schelling and Revelation 201 

would have been consistent to deny also the reasonableness of the 
world. He dared not, however, say this outright, but preferred to 
deny the reasonableness of philosophy. So he makes a most 
devious way for himself between reason and unreason, calls the 
reasonable the understandable a priori, the unreasonable the 
understandable a posteriori, and assigns the former to the “pure 
science of reason or negative philosophy”, the latter to a “positive 
philosophy“ yet to be founded. 

Here is the first great gulf between Schelling and all other 
philosophers, here is the first attempt to smuggle belief in dogma 
{Autoritatsglauben], sentimental mysticism, gnostic fantasy into the 
free science of thinking. The unity of philosophy, the wholeness of 
any world outlook, is torn apart into a most unsatisfactory 
dualism, the contradiction which makes up the world-historic 
significance of Christianity is raised to the principle of philosophy 
as well. Right from the start, therefore, we must protest against 
this division. Moreover, we shall see how invalid it is when we 
follow the train of thought with which Schelling seeks to justify his 
inability to grasp the universe as reasonable and whole. He 
proceeds from the scholastic dictum that in things the quid is to be 
distinguished from the quod, the what from the that. Reason 
teaches what things are, experience proves that they are. If one 
were to deny this distinction by maintaining the identity of 
thinking and being, this would be a misuse of the postulate. The 
result of the logical thought process is merely the thought of the 
world, not the real world. Reason is simply impotent to prove the 
existence of anything, and in this respect must accept the tes- 
timony of experience as sufficient. Philosophy, however, deals also 
with things which transcend all experience, with God, for exam- 
ple; hence the question is whether reason is capable of providing 
proof of their existence. To be able to answer this question, 
Schelling enters into a lengthy discussion which is here quite 
superfluous since the above premises do not admit any other 
answer than a decisive No. This is also the result of Schelling’s 
discussion. Hence according to Schelling it necessarily follows that 
in pure thought reason has not to deal with really existing things, 
but with things as possible, with their essence, not with their being; 
so that its subject is God’s essence, but not His existence. For the 
real God, therefore, a different sphere must be looked for than 
that of pure reason, the presupposition of existence must be 
granted to things which only later, a posteriori, have to show 
themselves as possible or reasonable and as accessible to experi- 
ence in their consequences, that is, as real. 

Here the contrast to Hegel is already set forth in all its 
sharpness. In that naive belief in the Idea to which Schelling is so 
superior, Hegel maintains that anything which is reasonable is also 
real; Schelling says, however, that what is reasonable is possible, 
and thus safeguards himself, for in view of the known extensive 
range of possibility, this proposition is irrefutable. But at the same 
time he thereby already proves what will be manifest later, namely, 
his unclarity concerning all purely logical categories. I could, 
indeed, at once point out the gap in the above battle order of 
conclusions through which the wicked enemy of dependence stole 
into the ranks of free thoughts, but I shall save this for a later 
occasion so as not to repeat myself, and shall at once go on to the 
content of the pure science of reason as Schelling construed it for 
his hearers to the great amusement of all Hegelians. It is the 
following: 

Reason is the infinite power of cognition. Power is the same as 
ability (Kant’s ability to know). As such it appears without any 
content, but nevertheless it has one, and indeed, without its own 
doing, without action on its part, for otherwise it would, of course, 
cease to be power, since power and action are opposites. This 
content, which is thus necessarily immediate, innate, can only be 
the infinite power of being, corresponding to the infinite power of 
cognition, since to every cognition there corresponds something 
which has being. This power of being, this infinite ability to be, is 
the substance from which we must derive our concepts. To be 
occupied with it is pure, self-immanent thinking. This pure ability 
to be is not just a readiness to exist but the concept of being itself, 
that which by its nature is eternally passing over into concept, or 
that which is about to pass over into being, that which cannot be 
prevented from being and is therefore passing over from thinking 
into being. This is the mobile nature of thinking, according to 
which it cannot stop at mere thinking but must constantly pass 
over into being. This is, however, no passing over into real being 
but only a logical passing over. So instead of the pure power there 
appears something that logically is being. But since the infinite 
power ‘stands in the relation of the prius to that which itself 
originates in thinking by passing over into being, and since only 
everything that really is being corresponds to the infinite power, 
reason possesses as its integral content the power to assume an a 
priori attitude to being and thus, without having recourse to 
experience, to arrive at the content of everything that really is 
being. That which occurs in reality reason has recognised as 
logically necessary possibility. It does not know whether the world 

Schelling and Revelation 203 

exists; it only knows that if it does, it must be of such and such a 
nature. 

Hence, the fact that reason is power compels us to regard its 
content also as potential. Hence God cannot be the immediate 
content of reason, for He is something real, not merely potential, 
possible. In the power of being we first discover the possibility to 
pass over into being. This being takes away from the power the 
domination over itself. Before, the power dominated being; it 
could pass over into it or not. Now it has fallen to being, is under 
its sway. This is being without mind, without concept, for mind is 
power over being. This conceptless being is no longer'to be found 
in nature, it has already all been taken possession of by form; but 
it is easy to see that this condition was preceded by a blind, 
boundless being, which lies at its basis as matter. But power is this 
freedom, this infinity, which can pass over into being or not, so 
that the two contradictory opposites in it, being and not-being, are 
not mutually exclusive. This second ability—also not to pass over 
into being—is the equal of the first, as long as the first remains 
power. Only when that which is immediately able to be actually 
passes over into being is the other excluded from it. The 
indifference of the two in the power then ceases, for now the first 
possibility posits the second outside itself. The ability to realise 
itself is given to this second only by the exclusion of the first. As in 
the infinite power the ability to pass over and the ability not to 
pass over do not exclude each other, so also they do not exclude 
that which hovers freely between being and not-being. Thus we 
have three powers. In the first a direct relation to being, in the 
second an indirect relation, which is able to be only by the 
exclusion of the first. So we now have 1) that which inclines to 
being; 2) that which inclines to not-being; 3) that which hovers 
freely between being and not-being. Before the act of passing 
over, the third is not distinct from the direct power and so will 
only become being when it is excluded by the first two; it can only 
come to be when the first two have passed over into being. With 
this ail possibilities are completed and the inner organism of 
reason is exhausted in this totality of powers. The first possibility 
is only that before which there can only be the infinite power 
itself. There is something which, when it has left the realm of 
possibility, is only one, but until it has decided to do so, it is instar 
omnium, the directly imminent, also that which resists, which offers 
resistance to the other that is destined to succeed it. By yielding its 
position it transfers its might to another, raising it to power. To 
this other that is raised to power it will subordinate itself as 

8* 

relative not-being. At first there appears that which can be in the 
transitive sense, which is therefore also the most accidental, the 
least substantiated, which can find its basis only in the subsequent, 
not in the preceding. Only in subordinating itself to this subse- 
quent, in becoming, by comparison, a relative not-being, does it 
obtain substantiation, only thus does it become something, since 
alone it would only be lost. This first is the prima materia of all 
being, itself arriving at determined being by placing above itself 
something higher. The second thing with the ability to be is only 
posited and raised into its power by the above exclusion of the 
first from its placidity; that which in itself is not yet able to be, 
now becomes something able to be through the negation. From its 
original indirect ability to be, it is posited as placid, calm willing 
and so it will necessarily work towards negating that by which it 
was itself negated, and thus towards returning into its own placid 
being. This can only come to pass by the first being brought back 
from its absolute alienation into its ability to be. Thus we 
obtain a superior ability to be, a being which has been brought 
back to its ability to be, which as something higher is a being with 
power over itself. Since with the direct ability to be the infinite 
power is not exhausted, the second within it must be the direct 
ability only not to be. But that which has the direct ability to be is 
already superior to the ability; hence, the second power must be 
the direct non-ability not to be, the perfectly pure being, for only 
the being is not the being able to be. The pure being can certainly 
be power, however contradictory this may seem, for it is not real 
being, it has not, like the latter, passed a potentia ad actum, but is 
actus purus. It is, of course, not immediate power, but from that it 
does not follow that it cannot be power at all. It must be negated in 
order to be realised; thus it is not power everywhere and 
throughout, but can become power through negation. As long as 
that which is immediately capable of being remained mere power, 
it was itself pure being; as soon as it raises itself above power, it 
presses the pure being out of its own being so as itself to become 
being. Pure being, negated as actus purus, thus becomes power. So 
it has no freedom of will but must work in order again to negate 
its negation. In this way it could indeed pass over ab actu ad 
potentiam and thus be realised outside itself. The first, the 
boundless being, was the non-willed, the hyle, with which the 
demiurge has to wrestle. It is posited so as at once to be negated 
by the second power. A bounded being must take the place of the 
boundless being, it must be led by stages back into the ability to 
be, and then is an ability which is self-possessing and, at the 

Schelling and Revelation 205 

highest stage, conscious of itself. So between the first and the 
second possibility there lie a mass of derived possibilities and 
medium powers. These are already the concrete world. If the 
power that was posited outside itself is fully brought back into 
ability, into self-possessing power, the second power, too, will leave 
the scene, because it is only there to negate the first and in the act 
of negating the first dissolves itself as power. The more it 
overcomes the opposing being, the more it destroys itself. At this 
stage it is not possible to stop. If the being is to be completed, in place 
of the being which was entirely overcome by the second power a 
third must be posited to which the second power completely 
transfers its might. This can be neither pure ability to be nor pure 
being, but only that which in being is ability to be and in ability to 
be is being, the contradiction of power and being posited as 
identity, that which hovers freely between the two, the spirit, an 
inexhaustible source of being, which is quite free and in being 
does not cease to remain power. This cannot work directly but can 
only be made actual through the second power. Since now the 
second is that which mediates between the first and the third, the 
third is posited by that first which was overcome by the second. 
This third, which remains unconquered in being, is, posited as 
spirit, that which is able to be and which consummates, so that 
with its entry into being the consummate being is there. In the 
self-possessing ability, in the spirit, lies the consummation of 
nature. This last can also devote itself to a new, consciously 

roduced movement and so form for itself a new, intellectual 
world standing above nature. This possibility, too, must be 
exhausted by science, which thereby becomes philosophy of nature 
and philosophy of spirit. 

Through this process everything that is not immanent in 
thinking, that has passed over into being, is eliminated and there 
remains the power which no longer needs to pass over into being, 
which no longer has being outside itself, whose ability to be is its 
being; the entity which is no longer subordinate to being, but is its 
being in its truth, what is called the supreme being. Thus the 
supreme law of thinking is fulfilled, power and action are together 
in one being, thinking is now by itself and hence is free thinking, no 
longer subject to an unceasing, necessary movement. Here that 
which was willed in the beginning has been reached, the self- 
possessing concept (for concept and power are identical) which, 
because it is unique of its kind, has a special name and, because it 
is that which was willed from the beginning, is called the Idea. For 
he who in thinking will not look to the result, whose philosophy is 

not conscious of its purpose, is like a painter who simply goes on 
painting, and the outcome can take care of itself. 

So far Schelling has communicated to us the content of his 
negative philosophy, and these outlines are perfectly sufficient to 
recognise the fantastic, illogical character of his mode of thinking. 
He is no longer capable of moving in pure thinking even for a 
short time; every moment the most fabulous, most bizarre phan- 
toms cross his path, so that the great horses drawing his carriage 
of thought rear and shy and he himself abandons his goal to chase 
after these phantoms. That the three powers, when reduced to 
their naked thought content, are nothing but the three elements 
of the Hegelian course of development through negation, only 
torn apart, fixed in their separateness and dressed up by 
“philosophy which is conscious of its purpose” in accordance with 
that purpose, can be seeri at first glance. It is a sad spectacle to 
watch Schelling drag thought down from its lofty, pure ether into 
the region of sensory perception, strike from its head the true 
golden crown and make it stagger about, drunk with the fog and 
mist of the unaccustomed, romantic atmosphere, in a crown of 
gilded paper, to be the laughing-stock of the street urchins, These 
so-called powers are no longer thoughts at all, they are nebulous, 
fantastic shapes in which the outlines of the three divine hypos- 
tases already shine clearly through the veil of cloud which 
mysteriously envelops them. Indeed, they already have a certain 
self-consciousness: one “inclines” to being, the other to not-being, 
the third “hovers freely” between the two. They “vield place to 
each other”, they have different “positions”, they “crowd” each 
other, they “resist”, they fight each other, they “seek to negate 
themselves”, they “work” and “endeavour”, etc. This strange 
sensualisation of thought again arises from a misunderstanding of 
the Hegelian logic. That powerful dialectic, that inner motive 
force which constantly drives the individual thought categories, as 
if it were the bad conscience of their imperfection and one- 
sidedness, to ever new development and rebirth until they arise 
from the grave of negation for the last time as absolute idea in 
imperishable, immaculate splendour, Schelling has been able to 
grasp in no other way than as the self-consciousness of the 
individual categories, while in fact it is the self-consciousness of the 
general, of thinking, of the Idea. He wants to raise the language 
of emotion to an absolutely scientific language without first having 
shown us pure thought in a language that alone is suitable to it. 
On the other hand, he is equally incapable of grasping the concept 
of being in its complete abstraction, as he shows if only by 

Schelling and Revelation 207 

constantly using as synonymous the concepts of being and of that 
which is. Being is thinkable for him only as matter, as hyle, as wild 
chaos. In addition we now already have several such matters, a 
“boundless being”, a “bounded being”, a “pure being”, a “logical 
being”, a “real being”, a “placid being”, and later we shall get, 
besides, an “unpremeditatable being” and a “contrary being”. It is 
amusing to see how these different beings collide and crowd each 
other out, how power has only the choice of losing itself in this 
chaotic mass or remaining an empty phantom. Do not tell me that 
this is only because of the figurative language; on the contrary, 
this gnostic-oriental dream thinking, which conceives every 
thought category either as personality or as matter, is the basis of 
the whole process. Take away the mode of looking at things and 
everything collapses. Even the basic categories, power and action, 
derive from a time of confusion, and Hegel was quite right when 
he threw these hazy categories out of logic. Schelling makes 
confusion worse confused and uses this opposition by turns, as it 
suits him, for the following Hegelian categories: being in itself and 
being for itself, ideality and reality, force and manifestation, 
possibility and actuality, and in all this power is, moreover, a 
separate, sensory-supersensory essence. The chief meaning which 
Schelling attributes to it is, however, that of possibility, and so we 
have a philosophy based on possibility. In this respect, Schelling 
rightly calls his science of reason the “none-exclusive” science, for 
in the end everything is possible. What matters, however, is that 
thought should prove its worth by its inner force to become real. 
The Germans will decline a philosophy which drags them along a 
bumpy road through the infinitely boring Sahara of possibility 
without giving them anything real to eat and drink and without 
leading them to any other goal than where the world, according to 
it, is boarded up to reason. 

But let us give ourselves the trouble to follow the road through 
Nothing. Schelling says: Essence is for concept, being for cogni- 
tion. Reason is the infinite power of cognition, its content the 
infinite power of being, as set out above. But now he suddenly 
starts actually to take cognisance of the infinite power of being 
through the power of cognition. Can he do it? No, cognition is 
actus, to actus corresponds actus, “to cognition corresponds a 
being”, hence to the above actual cognition corresponds the actual, 
real being. Hence, against its will, reason would have to cognise 
real being, and in spite of all endeavour to keep to the high seas 
of possibility we would at once be thrown on the hated beach of 
actuality. 

But, it is objected, the power of being is only cognised after its 
transition, which is certainly a logical one. Schelling himself indeed 
says that logical being and power of being, concept and power, are 
identical. When therefore the power of cognition actually passes 
over into actus, the power of being cannot be satisfied with a 
pretended, fictitious transition. If the power of being does not 
actually make the transition, it remains power, cannot be cognised 
by reason, and therefore is not the “necessary content of reason” 
but, on the contrary, the absolutely irrational. 

Or will Schelling call the activity which reason applies to its 
content not cognition, but, perhaps, conception? Then reason 
would have to be the infinite power of conception, since in its own 
science it would never attain to cognition. 

On the one hand, Schelling excludes existence from reason; on 
the other, he restores it to reason with cognition. Cognition is for 
him the unity of concept and existence, of logic and the empirical. 
Hence, contradictions at every turn. How is that? 

Is reason then the infinite power of cognition? Is the eye the 
power of seeing? The eye, even the closed eye, continues to see, it 
still sees darkness even if it believes it is not seeing anything. Only 
the diseased eye, the curably blind, is power of seeing without 
being actus; only the undeveloped or momentarily confused reason 
is mere power of cognition. But then does it not appear so 
plausible to understand reason as power? It is that, too, and not 
mere possibility, but absolute force, necessity of cognition. That, 
however, must manifest itself, must cognise. The separation of 
power and actus, of force and manifestation, belongs only to the 
finite; in the infinite, power is itself its actus, the force its own 
manifestation. For the infinite does not tolerate any contradiction 
within itself. If now reason is infinite power, then by virtue of this 
infinity it is also infinite actus. Otherwise the power itself would be 
conceived as finite. That is already the case in naive consciousness. 
Reason which does not get beyond the power of cognition is called 
unreason. Only that reason is accepted as reason which really 
proves itself by cognition, the eye only as a true eye if it sees. Here 
the contradiction between power and actus is at once seen as 
soluble and in the last resort void, and this solution is a triumph of 
Hegelian dialectic over Schelling’s narrowness, which never got 
beyond this contradiction; for even where power and actus are 
supposed to coincide in the Idea, this is merely asserted, and the 
fusion of the two concepts is not shown. 

But when Schelling says: Reason is conceiving, and since concept 
is power, it is power to cognise, which only becomes real cognition 

Schelling and Revelation 209 

when it finds something real to cognise; on the other hand, in the 
pure science of reason, where it is concerned with the power of 
being, reason does not go beyond the power of cognition and 
merely conceives—then nobody, even apart from the above 
discussion on power and actus, will deny that the purpose of the 
power of cognition is actually to pass on to cognition, and that it is 
nothing so long as it does not do this. So it turns out that the 
content of the pure science of reason is hollow, empty, useless, 
and that reason when it fulfills its purpose and actually cognises 
becomes unreason. If Schelling admits that the essence of reason is 
unreason, I have, of course, nothing more to say. 

So from the very start Schelling has got himself so tied up with 
his powers, transitions and correspondences that the only way out 
of the confusion of logical and real being, in which he does not 
want to be entangled, is the recognition of a line of thought other 
than his own. But let us proceed. 

Reason is now to conceive in this fashion the content of all 
actual being and take up an a priori attitude towards it; it is not 
supposed to prove that something exists, but that if something 
exists it must be of such and such a nature, in contrast to Hegel’s 
assertion that with thought real existence is also given. These 
statements are again downright confused. It has not occurred 
either to Hegel or anyone else to want to prove the existence of 
anything without empirical premises; he merely proves the necessi- 
ty of that which exists. Schelling here understands reason just as 
abstractly as earlier he understood power and actus and is in 
consequence driven to assign to it an existence prior to that of the 
world and separated from all other existence. The conclusion of 
modern philosophy, which was at least among the premises of 
Schelling’s earlier philosophy, and of which Feuerbach first made 
us conscious in all its sharpness, is that reason cannot possibly exist 
except as mind, and that mind can only exist in and with nature, 
and does not lead, so to say, a life apart, in separateness from it, 
God knows where. Schelling himself admits this when he describes 
as the aim of individual immortality not the liberation of mind 
from nature, but the proper balance of the two; also when he says 
further of Christ that he was not dissolved into the universe but was 
raised as a man on the right hand of God. (So the remaining two 
divine persons must have been dissolved in the universe after all?) 
But if reason exists, then its own existence is proof of the 
existence of nature. So the necessity exists that the power of being 
must pass over at once into the actus of being. Or, to use a ve 
humdrum phrase, intelligible even without Feuerbach and Hegel: 

So long as one abstracts from all existence one cannot talk about it 
at all. But if one starts from something existing it is, of course, 
possible to go on from that to other things, which, all conclusions 
being correctly drawn, must also exist. If the existence of the 
premises is admitted, the existence of the conclusion stands to 
reason. Now the basis of all philosophy is the existence of reason; 
this existence is proved by its activity (cogito, ergo sum); if therefore 
one proceeds from reason as existing, the existence of all its 
consequences follows of itself. No philosopher has yet denied that 
the existence of reason is a premise; and if Schelling does not 
want to admit this premise let him keep out of philosophy 
altogether. Thus Hegel could indeed prove the existence of 
nature, i.e., that it is a necessary consequence of the existence of 
reason. But Schelling, who wants to make his way into an abstract 
and empty immanence of thinking, forgets that all his operations 
are obviously based on the existence of reason and makes the 
ridiculous demand that real reason should have unreal, merely 
logical results, that a real apple-tree should produce only logical, 
potential apples. Such an apple-tree is usually called barren; 
Schelling would say: the infinite power of an apple-tree. 

If then Hegel’s categories are called not only the models 
according to which, but also the generating forces through which 
the things of this world have been created, this means nothing else 
than that they deduce the thought-content of the world and its 
necessary consequence from the existence of reason. Schelling, on 
the other hand, takes reason really for something which could also 
exist outside the world organism and so places its true realm in 
the hollow, empty abstraction, in the “aeon before the creation of 
the world”, which, fortunately, however, has never existed and in 
which reason still less ever found itself or even felt happy. But 
here we see how extremes meet: Schelling cannot grasp the 
concrete thought and drives it on to the most dizzying abstraction, 
which at once appears to him again as a sensory image, so that 
precisely this muddle of abstraction and conception is characteris- 
tic of Schelling’s scholastic-mystic way of thinking. 

We get new proofs of this when we turn to the exposition of the 
content of “negative philosophy”. The power of being serves as 
the basis. The caricature of Hegelian dialectic is most obvious. The 
power can make a transition, but it can also refrain from doing so, 
as it wishes. So in the retort of reason the two chemical 
components, being and not-being, are separated from the neutral 
power. If it were at all possible to bring back the business of 
power to sound reason, here would be the place where a 

Schelling and Revelation 211 

dialectical element shows itself and Schelling seems to divine that 
the essence of power is the necessity of transition and that power 
is only abstracted from the actus of reality. But no, he becomes 
more and more entangled in the one-sided abstraction. He lets 
the power make a trial transition and discovers the great thought 
that after the transition it has forfeited the chance not to make it. At 
the same time he discovers in the power a third thing, the possibi- 
lity not to do either and to hover freely between the two. These 
three possibilities or powers, it is declared, include all reasonable 
content, all possible being. 

The possibility to be becomes actual being. With that the second 
possibility, the ability also not to be, is negated. Will it seek to 
reconstitute itself? How can it do so when it is not overcome by a 
mere negation in the Hegelian sense, but is totally destroyed, 
reduced to nothing, to such radical not-being as can only occur in 
a philosophy of possibility? Crushed, swallowed, devoured, how 
should this possibility still have the strength to reconstitute itself? 
For not only the second possibility, but even the primeval power, 
the subject to which that second possibility is a mere predicate, is 
negated, and so not the latter, but the former, the primeval 
power, must seek to reconstitute itself. But that cannot at all be its 
intention — to stick to Schelling’s way of looking at things— for it 
is bound to know beforehand that by becoming actus, it would 
negate itself as power. Such a reconstitution can occur only when 
persons, not categories, negate themselves. Only boundless misun- 
derstanding, a monstrous passion for would-be improvement 
could so thoughtlessly distort the principle of Hegel's dialectic 
which is here clearly the basis. How undialectical the whole process 
is can also be shown thus: If the two sides in the power have equal 
strength, then, without an impulse from outside, it does not decide 
to make the transition at all and remains as before. Then, of 
course, the whole process would not take place, and Schelling 
would not know where to derive the prototypes of the world, of 
the spirit and the Christian Trinity. So one fails to see the 
necessity for the whole thing, it remains obscure why the power 
takes leave of its lovely potential peace, subjects itself to being, 
etc., and the whole process rests from the start on arbitrariness. If 
this happens in the “necessary” thinking, what will not occur in 
the “free”! But that is just the point: this transition must remain 
arbitrary, for otherwise Schelling would be admitting the necessity 
of the world and this does not fit into his positivism. But here 
again is proof that power is only power as actus, but without actus 
is only a hollow, empty absurdity with which even Schelling cannot 

be contented. For with empty power he is left without content, this 
only appears when the power becomes actus, and so against his will 
he has to acknowledge the untruth of the opposition of power and 
actus. 

Let us return once more to the second power, of which 
Schelling makes the most wonderful fuss. We have seen above how 
it was negated, reduced to nothing. Now Schelling says further: 
Since the first is that which can be, it is its opposite, everything 
except that which can be, hence the wholly pure being, actus purus! 
This, however, must already have lain in the primeval power, but 
how does it get there? How does that which is “averse to being, 
inclined to not-being”, etc., suddenly become wholly pure being; 
how does “pure being” differ from “boundless being”; why 1s 
there no other possibility for that which cannot be, but to be that 
which is? To that we get no reply. Instead we are assured that this, 
the second power, leads the first, which has become boundless, 
back into the condition of ability and thereby reconstitutes and at 
the same time—destroys itself! Who can understand that? Fur- 
thermore, this reduction process is fixed in its stages by the stages of 
nature. That nature should be the outcome is incomprehensible. 
Why, for example, is the boundless being the hyle? Because 
Schelling thought of the Ayle from the start and worked towards it; 
otherwise this being could have anything else as its sensory or 
spiritual content. That the stages of nature are to be conceived as 
powers is also incomprehensible. In that way the deadest, the 
inorganic, would have to be that which has the highest degree of 
being, the organic rather that which is able to be; but one can only 
regard this as a mystical image in which all thought-content has 
been lost. 

Now instead of conceiving the third power, the spirit—for 
again we can see Schelling working towards it from afar—as the 
highest quantitative stage of the first, which has been overcome by 
the second, and in which at the same time a qualitative change 
takes place, Schelling again does not know where to derive it from. 
“Science is looking round for a third.” “One cannot stop here.” 
“In place of the being overcome by the second power, a third 
must be posited.” These are the magic flourishes with which he 
conjures up the spirit. Now we learn how this spirit, which has 
made its entrance through generatio primitiva, is constituted. If we 
think of nature, it is, of course, evident that, given these premises, 
the spirit is to be understood as self-possessing ability to be (not 
mere ability), which, of course, is already bad enough; but if we 
abstract from this future nature, which will perhaps never even 

Schelling and Revelation 213 

come, if we keep to the pure powers, it is impossible to grasp, try 
as one may, that the first power, which has been brought back into 
ability to be by the second, can be anything but the primeval 
power. Schelling seems to have felt in Hegel the depth of the 
mediation which has passed through the negation and the opposi- 
tion, but it is beyond him to achieve anything like it. With him 
there are two things, indifferent to each other, one of which 
pushes the other aside, whereupon the second reconquers its place 
and drives the first back to its original position. Nothing else than 
the initial state can possibly result. Moreover, if the first is strong 
enough to push the second aside, where does the second suddenly 
find the strength to go over, after an unsuccessful defensive, to 
the offensive and drive the first away? I will say nothing about the 
unfortunate definition of the spirit; it refutes itself and the entire 
process of which it is the result. 

So we would now have happily worked through this so-called 
process of development and could pass on to other things, if 
Schelling, after finally the spirit had concluded all, had not held 
out for us the prospect of another, intellectual world, the coping- 
stone of which he calls the Idea. How Schelling, after the concrete 
nature and the living spirit, can now bring out the abstract idea (in 
this position it can indeed only be abstract), is quite incomprehen- 
sible, and Schelling should have justified this, since he rejects the 
contrary position of the Hegelian Idea. He arrives at this through 
his mania for having the absolute decidedly at the end of 
philosophy, and through his failure to comprehend how Hegel 
actually achieved this. The absolute is, however, the self-knowing 
spirit, and that, it is to be supposed, is what Schelling’s Idea is too; 
but according to Schelling this spirit is to be a postulate at the end 
of the negative philosophy. But that again is a contradiction. 
History cannot come into this philosophy since it has nothing to 
do with actuality; on the other hand, it is the philosophy of spirit, 
the crown of which is the philosophy of world history; moreover, 
the negative science is supposed to “exhaust this last possibility of 
a consciously occurring process” (which can only be history). 
Where does that leave us? This much is certain, that if Schelling 
had a philosophy of history, the self-knowing spirit would appear 
to him not as a postulate, but as a result. The self-knowing spirit 
is, however, a long way from being the concept of the personal 
God, as Schelling claims for the Idea. 

When Schelling had got thus far, he claimed that it had been his 
endeavour forty years earlier to give a coherent presentation of 
the science just outlined. The philosophy of identity, he said, had 

been intended only as this negative philosophy. Its slow, gradual 
elevation above Fichte had at least in part been intentional: 

“He had wished to avoid all abrupt transitions, to keep the continuity of 
philosophical development, and even flattered himself with the hope perhaps some 
time later to bring Fichte himself over to his side.” 

As if we did not know Hegel’s previously quoted saying or how 
little Schelling knew himself. The subject, which in the philosophy 
of identity comprised within. itself all positive content, is now 
declared to be power. Already in this philosophy it is supposed 
that all the stages of nature are being relative to the next higher 
stages, which are themselves ability to be and, in turn, being 
relative to their higher stages, so that what is there called subject 
and object here becomes ability to be and being until the final 
outcome is no longer that which relatively has being, but that 
which absolutely has “super-being”, the identity, no longer the 
mere indifference, of thinking and being, of power and actus, 
subject and object. Everything in this philosophy, however, accord- 
ing to Schelling, had been stated “presupposing the pure science 
of reason”, and the worst misunderstanding was that the whole 
was taken for a not merely logical but also a real process, that this 
philosophy was thought to infer from a principle that was true in 
itself, the truth of all that followed. Only when this philosophy 
had reached its conclusion, did being, which was no longer able to 
alienate itself, remain stationary in its full splendour and see 
nature and spirit beneath it as its throne to which it had been 
raised; yet, for all its sublimity this was no more than a construc- 
tion of thought and only to be transformed into a real process by 
a complete reversal. 

For the moment we will leave it open whether this presentation 
of the philosophy of identity has not been adapted to Schelling’s 
present views, whether forty years ago he cared as little for the 
reality of his thoughts as now, and whether it would not have been 
better to remove the “greatest misunderstanding” with two words, 
which could easily have been done, instead of maintaining a 
superior silence; we shall go on directly to the judgment of the 
man who “pushed” Schelling “out of his place”, without the latter 
hitherto having been able to “negate that which has negated him”. 

Schelling says that while almost everybody understood the 
philosophy of identity wrongly and superficially, Hegel rescued its 
fundamental thought and acknowledged it to the last, as testified 
by his Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der Philosophie. Hegel erred in 
that he took the philosophy of identity for the absolute philosophy 
and did not acknowledge that there are things which go beyond it. 

Schelling and Revelation 215 

Its limit was the ability to be; he went beyond that and drew being 
into its compass. His basic error was that he wished to turn it into 
an existential system. He believed the philosophy of identity had 
the absolute for its subject not merely in essence, but in existence. 
By bringing existence into it, he leaves the sphere of development 
of pure reason. So he is consistent when he begins his science with 
pure being and thereby denies the prius of existence. Thus it 
came about that he was only immanent in the non-immanent, for 
being is that which is non-immanent in thinking. Then he claims 
to have demonstrated the absolute in logic. So he had the absolute 
twice, at the end of logic, where it is derived in exactly the same 
way as at the end of the philosophy of identity, and at the end of 
the whole process. This shows, therefore, that logic is not to be 
premised as the first part of the development but should rather 
pervade the whole process. Hegel defines logic as a subjective 
science in which thinking is in and with itself alone, prior to and 
outside all actuality. And yet thinking is supposed to have the 
actual, real idea as its terminal point. While with its first step the 
philosophy of identity is within nature, Hegel throws nature out of 
logic and thereby declares it illogical. The abstract concepts of 
Hegel’s logic do not belong to the beginning of philosophy; they 
can enter it only when consciousness has absorbed the whole of 
nature, for they are mere abstractions from nature. So there can 
be no question of objective logic in Hegel, for just where nature, 
the object, begins, logic ceases. So in logic the Idea is in the 
process of becoming, but only in the thought of the philosopher; 
its objective life only begins when it has arrived at consciousness. 
But as actually existing, it is already at the end of logic—hence it 
is impossible to continue with it. For the Idea as absolute 
subject-object, as ideal-real, is complete in itself and incapable of 
further progress; how then can it still pass over into the other, into 
nature? Here it becomes clear that in the pure science of reason 
there can be no question of an actually existing nature. What 
concerns actual existence must be reserved for positive philosophy. 

The error of this presentation rests mainly on the naive belief 
that Hegel did not advance beyond Schelling’s standpoint and 
that, moreover, he misunderstood it. We have seen that, try as he 
will, Schelling cannot get away from existence, and therefore there 
is hardly any need to justify Hegel for not making this claim of 
abstract ideality. Even if Schelling could abide by the pure power, 
his own existence should convince him that the power has made 
the transition, hence that all consequences of mere logical being 
now belong in the real, and hence the “absolute” exists. After 

that, why does he still need positive philosophy? If the logical 
absolute follows from the logical world, the existing absolute 
follows from the existing world. But that Schelling cannot be 
content with this and now in addition assumes a positive 
philosophy of faith shows how strongly the empirical, extra- 
mundane existence of the absolute contradicts all reason, and how 
strongly Schelling himself feels this. Because Schelling now seeks 
to pull down to his own low level the Hegelian Idea, which stands 
infinitely high above the absolute of the philosophy of identity 
since it is what the other merely pretends to be, he cannot grasp 
the relation of the Idea to nature and spirit. Schelling again 
conceives the Idea as an extra-mundane being, as a personal God, 
a thing which never occurred to Hegel. For Hegel the reality of 
the Idea is nothing but—nature and spirit. That is also why Hegel 
does not have the absolute twice. At the end of logic the Idea is 
there as ideal-real, but for that very reason it is, of course, also 
nature. If it is only expressed as Idea it is merely ideal, merely 
logically existing. The ideal-real absolute, complete in itself, is 
nothing but the unity of nature and spirit in the Idea. Schelling, 
however, still conceives the absolute as absolute subject, for, 
although it is filled with the content of objectivity, it still remains 
subject without becoming object, i. e., the absolute is for him real 
only in the shape of the personal God. He should leave him out 
altogether and keep to the pure definition of the concept in which 
it is not a question of personality. So the absolute is not real 
outside nature and mind. If it were, they would, of course, both 
be superfluous. Hence, if in logic it was a question of the ideal 
definitions of the Idea as real in nature and mind, it is now a 
question of this reality itself, of the demonstration of these 
definitions in existence, which is the final test and at the same time 
the highest stage of philosophy. So an advance out of logic is 
indeed not only possible but necessary, and in the self-conscious, 
infinite mind this very advance returns to the Idea. So we can see 
the nullity of Schelling’s assertions that Hegel declares nature 
illogical (which Schelling, by the way, at once declares the whole 
world to be), that his logic, the necessary, self-active development 
of thought, is “subjective science, and that objective logic cannot 
exist at all since it is philosophy of nature and this philosophy has 
been thrown out of logic”. As 1f the objectivity of science consisted 
in its regarding an external object as such! If Schelling calls logic 
subjective, there is no reason not* to declare the philosophy of 

_* There is an obvious misprint here in the German text, where nicht (not) is 
missing — Ed. 

Schelling and Revelation 217 

nature also subjective, for the same subject which thinks here 
also thinks there, and it does not matter, of course, what 
content is under consideration. Hegel’s objective logic, however, 
does not develop the thoughts, it lets them develop them- 
selves, and the thinking subject is, as mere spectator, quite acci- 
dental. 

Passing on to the philosophy of spirit, Schelling now 
proceeds from those utterances in which Hegel’s philosophy is at 
war with his personal inclinations and prejudices. The religious- 
philosophical side of the Hegelian system gives him occasion to 
point out contradictions between premises and conclusions which 
have long since been discovered and acknowledged by the Young 
Hegelian school. Thus he says quite correctly: This philosophy 
wants to be Christian, to which, however, nothing whatever 
compels it; if it maintained its original attitude as science of 
reason, it would have its truth in itself— He then concludes his 
remarks by acknowledging Hegel’s statement that art, religion and 
philosophy are the ultimate forms of achieving the absolute. Only 
since art and religion transcend the pure science of reason, this 
philosophy—and this he takes for the dialectical point of the 
statement — would also have to do so and be a second philosophy, 
different from the former one. But where does Hegel say this? At 
the end of the Phanomenologie, where he has the whole of logic 
before him as a second philosophy. Phenomenology, how- 
ever—here stands out the very opposite of Schelling’s interpreta- 
tion— was not the pure science of reason, but only the path to it, 
the raising of the empirical, of sensory consciousness to the level 
of the pure science of reason. Not logical, but phenomenological 
consciousness finds these three before it as ultimate “possibilities 
to assure itself of the existence of the absolute super-being”. 
Logical, free consciousness sees quite different things, with which, 
however, we need not concern ourselves for the moment; it has 
the absolute already in itself. 

So the difficult step will have been taken and the apostasy from 
pure reason openly pronounced. Since the scholastics, Schelling is 
the first to have dared this step; for Jacobi and his like do not 
count, since they represented their time only in certain aspects, 
never in its wholeness. For the first time for five hundred years a 
hero of science stands up and declares science the servant of faith. 
He has done it—the consequences be on his head. We can only be 
glad that the man who was a representative of his time like no one 
else, in whom his century came to self-consciousness, that this man 
is declared also by Schelling the finest flower of the science of 

reason. Let him who believes in the omnipotence of reason take to 
heart this testimony of an enemy. 

_ Schelling describes positive philosophy as follows: It is quite 
independent of negative philosophy and cannot start with the end 
of this philosophy as something existing, but must itself first 
demonstrate existence. The end of the negative philosophy is in 
the positive philosophy not a principle but a task; the beginning of 
the positive philosophy is absolute through itself. The unity of the 
two has never existed, nor could it be achieved either by 
suppressing one or by mixing the two. It can be proved that the 
two have always been in conflict with each other. (Here follows the 
attempt at such a demonstration from Socrates to Kant, in whom 
empiricism and apriorism are claimed to be again sharply sepa- 
rated. We must pass over this, since it remains without any result.) 
Now positive philosophy is, howéver, not pure empiricism, least of 
all of the kind which is based on inner, mystic-theosophical 
experience; it has its principle in that which occurs neither in 
mere thinking nor in experience, but in the absolutely transcen- 
dental, which goes beyond all experience and all thinking and 
precedes both. Hence the beginning must not be a relative prius, 
as in pure thinking, where the power has the transition before it, 
but the absolute prius, so that we proceed not from concept to 
being but from being to concept. This transition is not necessary, 
like the first, but is the consequence of a free act which overcomes 
being and is proved a posteriori empirically. For if it can be 
immaterial to negative philosophy, which rests on logical consisten- 
cy, whether there is a world and whether this world agrees with its 
construction, positive philosophy progresses through free thinking 
and so must find its confirmation in experience, with which it has 
to keep pace. If negative philosophy is pure apriorism, positive 
philosophy is a priori empiricism. Since in it a free thinking, i.e., a 
thinking with volition, is presupposed, its proofs are also only for 
the willing, and the “wise”; one must not only understand it but 
have the will to feel its power. If revelation is also among the 
objects of experience, then it belongs as much to positive 
philosophy as to nature and mankind, and has therefore no other 
authority for this philosophy than for anything else; as for 
astronomy, for example, the movements of the planets are indeed 
authorities with which the calculations have to agree. If it is 
claimed that without preceding revelation philosophy would not 
have arrived at this result, this is correct, of course, in a way, but 
now philosophy can also do it by itself. Just as there are people 
who, when they have once discerned small fixed stars with the 

Schelling and Revelation 219 

telescope, can afterwards see them also with the naked eye and 
hence are no longer dependent on the telescope. Philosophy must 
take in Christianity, which is as much reality as are nature and 
mind, yet not only revelation, but the inner necessity of the merely 
logical philosophy forces it to transcend itself. Negative philosophy 
brings everything only to the point of cognisability and then hands 
it over to the other sciences; only the one ultimate thing it cannot 
bring to this point and that is the thing most worthy of cognition; 
this it must take up again in a new philosophy which has the task 
to demonstrate precisely this ultimate thing as existing. Thus 
negative philosophy becomes philosophy only in relation to posi- 
tive philosophy. If negative philosophy were alone, it would have 
no real result, and reason would be void; in positive philosophy it 
triumphs; reason, which in negative philosophy was bowed down, 
again stands erect. 

I hardly need say anything in elucidation of these Schellingian 
propositions; they explain themselves. But if we compare them 
with the promises Schelling made in the beginning, what a 
difference is revealed! Philosophy was to be revolutionised, a 
teaching was to develop which would put an end to the negative 
philosophy of recent years, the reconciliation of faith and knowl- 
edge was approaching, and in the end what is the outcome? A 
teaching which has no foundation either in itself or in anything 
else that has been proved. Here, it is based on a thinking freed 
from all logical necessity, that is, an arbitrary, empty thinking; 
there, on something of which precisely the reality is in question, 
and of which the claims are disputed, namely, revelation. What a 
naive demand that in order to cure oneself of doubt one must cast 
away doubt! “Well, if you don’t believe, there is no help for you!” 
What did Schelling come to Berlin for? Instead of his positive 
treasure he should have brought with him a refutation of Strauss’ 
Leben Jesu, of Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums, etc.; then he 
might have done something; as it is, the Hegelians prefer to 
remain stuck in the notorious “blind alley” rather than “place 
themselves at his mercy”; and the positive theologians will also 
prefer to continue to work from revelation rather than steep 
themselves deeper in it. Then, too, his admission, repeated day 
after day since the New Year, that he wishes to give neither proof 
of Christianity nor any speculative dogma but merely a contribu- 
tion to the explanation of Christianity, falls into place. The need 
of negative philosophy to transcend itself, as we have seen, has not 
much to it either. If the assumption of the transition a potentia ad 
actum leads necessarily to the logical God dependent only on this 

assumption, the empirically demonstrated real transition leads to 
the real God, and positive science is superfluous. 

Schelling takes the transition to positive philosophy from the 
ontological proof of the existence of God. God cannot exist by 
chance, hence “if He exists”, He exists of necessity. This clause 
inserted in the gap of the argument is quite correct. So God can 
only be that which is in and before itself (not for itself; Schelling is 
so furious with Hegel that he even thinks he must criticise his 
expressions as misuse of language and improve on them), ie., He 
exists before Himself, before His divinity. So He is blind being, 
prior to all thinking. But since it is doubtful whether He exists, we 
must proceed from that blind being, and see whether we cannot 
arrive at the concept of God from there. Hence, if in negative 
philosophy the principle is the thinking which precedes all being, 
in positive philosophy it is the being which precedes all thinking. 
This blind being is the necessary being; God, however, is not this 
being but that which of necessity “is necessary”; the necessary 
being alone is the ability to be of the supreme being. Blind being 
is that which requires no substantiation, since it precedes all 
thinking. Thus positive philosophy begins with something al- 
together beyond concepts so as to make it a posteriori, as God, 
conceivable and the immanent content of reason. Here only is the 
latter free and has escaped from the realm of necessary thinking. 

This “blind being” is hyle, the eternal matter of earlier 
philosophy. That it develops itself into God is at least new. Up to 
now it has always been the dualistic principle opposed to God. But 
let us consider further the content of positive philosophy. 

This blind being, which can also be called “unpremeditatable 
being”, is the purus actus of existence and the identity of essence 
and being (which in the case of God is described as aseity). But 
this, it seems, cannot serve as the basis of a process, since it lacks 
all motive force, which lies only in power. But why should the 
actus purus be denied all possibility of subsequently also becoming 
power; it does not follow that the being which is cannot post actum 
also be that which has ability to be. Unpremeditatable being can 
afterwards be given the possibility—nothing stands in the 
way —of letting a second being emerge from itself. Blind being 
thereby becomes power, for it receives something which it can will 
and so becomes master of its own blind being. If it releases this 
second being, the first blind being is only potentia actus purus and is 
thus self-possessing being (but all this is only hypothesis which has 
to be proved by success); only by differentiation from the second 
does it become conscious of itself as necessary by its nature; blind 

Schelling and Revelation 221 

being appears as accidental because it is not foreseen, and so has 
to prove itself necessary by overcoming its opposite. This is the 
ultimate ground of the being which stands in opposition to it, and 
hence the ultimate ground of the world. The law that everything 
must become clear and nothing remain hidden is the supreme law 
of all being; not, of course, a law that stands above God, but one 
which first sets Him free, and is therefore already itself a divine 
law. This great world law, this world dialectic, is simply unwilling 
that there should be anything undecided. It alone can solve the 
great riddles. Nay, God is so just that He acknowledges that 
opposed principle to the very end and until all contradiction is 
exhausted. All involuntary, unpremeditatable being is unfree; the 
true God is the living God who can become something other than 
the unpremeditatable. Otherwise it must either be assumed with 
Spinoza that everything emanates from the divine nature necessar- 
ily, without it doing anything towards it (bad pantheism), or that 
the concept of creation is one that cannot be grasped by reason 
(shallow theism which cannot overcome pantheism). Thus unpre- 
meditatable being becomes the power of the opposite, and since 
potentiality is for it something intolerable, it will necessarily want 
to work towards its restoration into actus purus. So the second 
being must again be negated by the first and be led back into 
power. So it becomes master not only of the first power, but also 
of the second, the power to transform its unpremeditatability into 
a being and thereby to remove it from itself and thus give up its 
entire existence. In this also lies its essence, which hitherto was 
concealed by being; the pure being, which through resistance has 
received a power into itself, is now independent as essence. Thus 
the master of the first possibility has also been given the possibility 
to reveal itself as itself, as free from necessary being, to posit itself 
as spirit; for spirit is that which is free to work or not to work, 
which in being is master of itself and remains in being even when 
it does not manifest itself. But this is not that which is directly able 
to be, nor that which must be, but that which, being able to be, must 
be. These three moments appear to the unpremeditatable being as 
that which properly should be, so that there is nothing outside these 
three moments and everything which is of the future is excluded. 

The train of thought in positive philosophy is, as we see, very 
“free”. Schelling does not conceal that he proposes only hypoth- 
eses which have yet to be proved by success, i.e., by agreement 
with revelation. It is a consequence of this free, willing thinking 
that he lets the “unpremeditatable being” behave exactly as if it 
were already that which has yet to be developed from it, namely, 

God. The unpremeditatable being can, of course, not yet see, will, 
release, or lead back. It is nothing but a naked abstraction of 
matter which is most remote precisely from anything personal, 
self-conscious. It is not possible by any kind of development to 
introduce self-consciousness into this rigid category unless it is 
understood as matter and develops through nature to spirit, like 
the “boundless being” in negative philosophy from which it is 
distinguished only by the empty attribute of unpremeditatability. 
This unpremeditatability can only lead to materialism and at most 
to pantheism, but never to monotheism. Cuvier’s saying here also 
proves correct: 

“Schelling puts metaphors in the place of arguments, and instead of developing 
concepts he changes images and aliegories according to his needs.” 

Moreover, the method of argument in which every advance is 
rejected with “there is no reason why this should not happen, there 
is no logical necessity that this should not be possible”, etc., has 
never been encountered in philosophy, at least up to now. In this 
way the Chinese and Otaheitan* religions can also be deduced out 
of the “unpremeditatable being”, and that, too, is justified since 
they are just as much facts as Christianity. But as for the newly- 
discovered world law that everything must become clear, it cannot 
be denied that here at least very little becomes clear and very much 
remains hidden. Here we only see clarity of thought sink into the 
dark abyss of fantasy. But if that law means that everything must 
justify itself to reason for its existence, then this again is one of 
Hegel’s basic thoughts and, moreover, it is not applied by 
Schelling himself. Considerable time may still be spent im a vain 
endeavour to bring the conclusion of the above presentation with 
its “can”, “must”, and “should” to a point where everything 
becomes clear. Above all, we must ask: In what relation do the 
three positive powers stand to the three negative ones? Only one 
thing becomes clear, that they are indeed possibilities which should 
be, but not possibilities which, being able to be, must be. 

This “most thoroughgoing” dialectic, Schelling maintains, alone 
makes it possible to advance from Spinoza’s necessarily-existing 
actu to the necessarily-being natura sua. For this is all he could 
have wanted to do, since he did not want to prove the existence of 
the divine, but only the divinity of that which exists (Young 
Hegelian philosophy does precisely the same), namely, the divinity 
of that which exists actu, eternally, of itself. But who then will 
prove to us that anything exists from eternity? That which is actu, 

* Otaheite— former name of the island of Tahiti.— Ed. 

Schelling and Revelation 223 

of itself, can only lead to the eternity of matter, if one argues 
logically. And illogical conclusions have no validity, even if 
revelation agrees with them. 

“If, in accordance with a weak dialectic, we were to say: God only assumes the 
power of the opposed being so as to transform the blind affirmation of His 
existence into one mediated by negation, the question is why does He do so? Not 
for His own sake, for He knows His might; only for the sake of others can He 
make the being which differs from Himself into the object of volition. Only in this 
being-away-from-Himself lies God’s essence, His beatitude; all His thoughts are 
only outside Himself, in creation. Thus it is, indeed, a process of suspension and 
restoration, but in between there lies the whole world.” 

How ridiculous is here the arrogance with which this caricature 
of a most thoroughgoing dialectic looks down upon its “weak” 
original It has not even understood it sufficiently to present it 
correctly. According to Schelling, even Hegel thinks in this 
speculative manner; Schelling makes him reason something like 
this: Here is God. He creates the world. It negates Him. Why? 
Because it is evil? God forbid, only because it exists. It takes up all 
space for itself, and God, who does not know where to turn, finds 
Himself compelled to negate it again. Then He must destroy it, of 
course. The profundity, however, according to which the negation 
necessarily follows from what exists yet only in itself, as the 
unfolding of the innermost essence, as the awakener of conscious- 
ness, until in its supreme activity it must negate itself again out of 
itself and brings forth as product the developed, that which stays 
with itself, the free—of that Schelling can have no idea, for his 
God is free, i.e., acting arbitrarily. 

God or the unpremeditatable being has now posited the world 
or the contrary being. This exists only in God’s will and depends 
on it. His justice does not allow it to be destroyed in one blow for 
the sake of His restoration, for the contrary being now has, as it 
were, a right, a will independent of God. Hence it is brought back 
through the two last powers, gradually and according to a 
principle which determines the stages of the process. If then the 
first power was the cause which started the whole movement and 
the cause of the contrary being, the second was the one posited ex 
actu, which, realising itself by overcoming the first and acting on 
the contrary being, subjected this to the third power, so that the 
contrary being stepped between the three powers as a concrete 
thing. These now prove to be: causa materialis, ex qua; causa effi- 
ciens, per quam; causa finalis, in quam (secundum quam) omnia fiunt.? 

? Material cause from which, efficient cause through which, final cause in 
conformity with which (according to which) everything happens.— Ed. 

If now unpremeditatable being is a condition of divinity, so with 
the creation God exists as such, as lord of being who has it in His 
power to realise or not to realise those possibilities. He remains 
outside the whole process and goes beyond that triad of causes as 
causa causarum. So as not to make the world appear as an emana- 
tion of His essence, it was for God to try all possible positions of 
the powers relative to one another, i.e., to let the future world 
pass before Him as in a vision. For mere omnipotence and omni- 
science does not ensure this by itself, but the works are present 
as visions of the creator. Hence that primeval power, that prime 
cause of the contrary being, has always been specially glorified; 
it is the Indian Maja (akin to the German Macht, power), which 
spreads out the nets of mere appearance so as to move the 
creator to real creation, like Fortuna primigenia at Praeneste.’* 

I will not add a word so as not to rub off the mystic butterfly 
dust of this vision. 

Now it cannot be proved a priori that God really creates, it is 
explained by the sole need which can be attributed to God, the 
need to be known, which is precisely a quality most inherent in the 
noblest natures. The God of creation is not just the single God, 
but the single God in a plurality, and since this plurality (these 
powers) is self-contained, the creator is the All-One, and this is 
monotheism. Since He precedes everything He can have no equal, 
for powerless being is capable of absolutely nothing [kann Uberhaupt 
nicht](!). God, of whom it is said only in passing that He is the sole 
one, is merely the God of the theists; monotheism demands the 
soleness without which God is not God, while theism stops at 
infinite substance. The advance from here to that which is God in 
relation to things is pantheism; in it, the things are determinants 
of God. Only monotheism contains God as the real, living God, 
where the unity of substance has disappeared in the power and 
has been replaced by a supersubstantial unity, so that God is the 
unconquerable One against three. Though several, they are not 
several gods, but only one God, not several in divinity. Monotheism 
and pantheism are thus advances over theism, which is the last 
expression of the absolute in negative philosophy. In monotheism 
there is the transition to Christianity, for the singleness finds its 
definite expression in the Trinity. 

However much one may try to grasp this Trinity, there always 
remain three against one, one against three. If God is the unity of 
three, He can be so only as a fourth, or else there remain three 
gods. If only divinity is their unity, then humanity is likewise the 
unity of all human beings and just as we have only one God, so we 

Schelling and Revelation 225 

have only one human being. But the many can no more be done 
away with than the three, and three persons will never make one. 
The old contradiction of the Trinity lies bare, and we are amazed 
at Schelling’s boldness in claiming it has been solved. That only 
the Trinity is the true expression of unity is again taken from 
Hegel, but as usual made shallow to the point of sheer emptiness. 
With Hegel the Trinity remains a succession of the stages of God’s 
development, if one insists on having a god in his system. Here, 
however, the three moments are conceived as standing side by side 
as personalities, and the original proposition is advanced that the 
true personality of one person is that it is three persons. 

Up to now we have indeed only the one person, the Father. For 
if a prior being removes from itself something belonging to it, so 
that the latter necessarily realises itself, this is rightly called pro- 
creation. If now in this process of realisation the contrary being 
(B) is actually overcome, the second power, like the first, is master 
over it, and hence the divinity of the Son is equal to that of the 
Father. So, too, the third power, which, as essence free of being, 
can only return into being after overcoming B, but then has the 
same glory and personality as the first two and appears as the 
Holy Ghost. So in the end there are three personalities, but not 
three gods, since being is one, and hence also the glory of it is 
only one (as though the two Spartan kings, because their rule was 
one, had been only one king!). In the powers, while they are in 
tension, we only see the natural side of the process (“tension” 
appears to be the process of negative philosophy) as the genesis 
of the world; only with the persons is there opened up the world 
of the divine and the divine significance of that process in which 
being, originally as possibility in the Father, is given to the Son and 
by him returned to the Father as overcome. Besides being given 
to the Son, it is also given to the Holy Ghost, by Father and Son, 
and it has only that being which is common to them both. The 
tension of the powers pervades all nature, and is present in a 
certain proportion in everything. Everything that arises is a fourth 
between the powers, but man, in whom the tension becomes fully 
resolved, already has a relationship to the personalities as such, 
for in him that last moment of realisation is expressed in which 
the powers become real personalities. This process, then, is a process 
of creation for things, and a theogonic process for the personalities. 

Thus, out of the abyss of unpremeditatable being Schelling has 
conjured up for us into the light of day not only the personal but 
also the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, though the third 
has indeed only been accommodated with difficulty, and then the 

arbitrarily created world, dependent on arbitrariness and there- 
fore hollow and void; and he has thus the basis of Christianity. It 
cannot be my intention to show up one by one the inconsistencies, 
the arbitrary judgments, the rash claims, the gaps, leaps, assump- 
tions and confusions of which Schelling is guilty here; if things 
were already bad enough in the necessary thinking, in the free 
thinking one must reckon with an even greater confusion of 
scholasticism and mysticism—that is the essence of neo- 
Schellingianism. The reader can neither demand such superhu- 
man patience of me, nor I of the reader such interest in the 
matter. Moreover, what lies on the surface does not first have to 
be uncovered. My purpose is merely to follow the train of thought 
in general, only to show how between Hegel and Schelling 
precisely the opposite occurs of what Schelling affirms. Now, on 
the ground of Christianity, we can let the facts speak for 
themselves even more. Firstly, Schelling declares his inability to 
understand the world insofar as he is unable to understand evil. 
Man could, or could not, remain in God; that he did not do so was 
an act of free will on his part. He thereby put himself in God’s 
place and, where everything seemed ordered, jeopardised every- 
thing again. Separated from God, the world was exposed to 
externals, and the element in an ordered system [Moment] lost its 
position as such. The Father was “as it were” pushed out of his 
place (later, the “as it were” is omitted). 

But the Christian Trinity was still not there, and the Son’s will, 
his own, independent of the Father’s, was not yet pronounced. But 
now, at the end of the creation, there appears something new, the 
B which possesses itself in Man. He can choose whether to be or 
not to be one with God. He does not want to be and thereby 
pushes the superior power back into potentiality, w which now, 
separated from the Father by the will of Man, is as much the Son 
of Man as the Son of God (this is the significance of the expression 
in the New Testament) and has a being both divine and 
extra-divine. Now the superior power can follow being into extra- 
divinity and lead it back to God. The Father is now turned away 
from the world and no longer acts in it with his will but with his 
unwillingness (this is the true significance of the wrath of God). So 
the Father did not destroy the evil world, but preserved it in view 
of the Son, as it is written. In him, i. e., in view of him, all things 
are made. So we have here two periods: the age of the Father, 
where being (the world) still lay in the Father as power and the 
Son was not yet independent, and the age of the Son, the time of 
the world, whose history is that of the Son. This age again has two 

Schelling and Revelation 237 

periods; in the first man is entirely under the sway of the contrary 
being, the B, the cosmic powers. Here the Son is in the state of 
negation, of the deepest suffering, of passivity, at first excluded 
from being (i. e., from the world), unfree, outside human 
consciousness. Jt can only work in a natural way towards the 
conquest of being. This is the time of the old covenant, where the 
Son strives for dominion over being not according to his will, but 
according to his nature. So far this significance of that time has 
been missed in science, nobody has grasped it yet. It is most 
definitely indicated in the Old Testament, namely, in Chapter 53 
of Isaiah, which speaks of the present suffering of the Messiah. The 
second period only begins with the strengthening of the second 
power, with the achievement of dominion over being, when it 
acts freely and with will. This is the time of its appearance in 
Christ, the time of revelation. This is the key to Christianity; with 
this Ariadne’s thread it is possible “to fimd the way through the 
labyrinth of my trains of thought”— Through the rebellion of 
man the personalities that arose through the overcoming of B in 
creation become again mere possibilities, pushed back into poten- 
tiality and excluded from consciousness, posited outside God. 
Here now is the cause of a new process which takes place in the 
consciousness of man and from which the divinity is excluded, for 
in their tension the powers are extra-divine. This process of the 
subjugation of consciousness to the dominion of the powers took 
place in paganism as mythological development. The deeper 
historical precondition of revelation is mythology. We must now 
trace in the philosophy of mythology the individual powers in the 
mythological consciousness and the consciousness of them in the 
Greek mysteries. 

The question arises whether this influence of man on the 
self-development of God—for it can only be called that— which 
Schelling affirms, is Christian? For the Christian God is one who 
has been complete from all eternity, whose composure suffers no 
change even through the Son’s temporary life on earth. In 
general, according to Schelling the creation ends ignominiously. 
The house of cards of the “intermediate powers, the relatively 
being and able to be”, has no sooner been built and the three 
powers are on the point of becoming personalities than stupid 
man plays a silly trick and all the ingenious architectonics come 
tumbling down and the powers remain powers as before. It is just 
as in the fairy-tale, where a treastire, surrounded by brightly 
shining phantoms, is conjured up from the depths; already the 
coveted treasure is seen rising over the edge of the abyss—then a 

rash word is spoken, the phantoms dissolve, the treasure sinks and 
the depths close over it forever. Schelling’s God could have done 
His job a little more cleverly, and He would then have saved 
Himself much trouble and us the philosophy of revelation. 
Schelling’s mysticism, however, comes to its finest flowering in the 
Son’s state of suffering. This obscure, mysterious relationship of 
divine extra-divinity, conscious unconsciousness, active inactivity, 
unwilling will, this spate of crowding contradictions is for Schelling 
indeed a priceless gold-mine of conclusions, for anything can be 
derived from it. Still more unclear is the relationship of this power 
to man’s consciousness. All powers here act as cosmic, natural 
powers, but how? What are cosmic powers? Not a single one of 
Schelling’s pupils, not even Schelling himself, can give a rational 
answer. This is again one of those confused, mystical thought- 
categories in which he has to take refuge in order to arrive, even 
“with free, self-determined thinking”, at revelation. 

“The mythological concepts cannot be explained in any other way than as the 
necessary product of consciousness which has fallen under the sway of the cosmic 
powers.” 

But the cosmic powers are the divine powers in their state of 
tension, the divine as non-divine. In this way, then, we are to 
explain also the relation of mythology to nature, to obtain entirely 
new facts and to supply a content to the prehistoric period of 
mankind, namely, by the “immense agitation of the mind and 
heart in begetting concepts of gods”. 

We can spare ourselves the presentation of the “philosophy of 
mythology” since it is not directly part of the philosophy of 
revelation and, moreover, Schelling will treat of it in greater detail 
next term. This part of the lectures, incidentally, was by far the 
best and contains much that should not be rejected—once it is 
freed from the mystical, distorting outlook—even by him who 
considers these phases of consciousness from a free, purely human 
standpoint. The question is only how far this is really Schelling’s 
property, and whether it does not in fact originate with Stuhr. 
The chief fault of Schelling’s presentation is that he does not 
conceive the mythological process as the free self-development of 
consciousness within world-historic necessity, but constantly in- 
troduces superhuman principles and forces, and does so in the 
most confused manner, so that these powers are at one and 
the same time the “substance of consciousness” and yet again 
something more. Resort to such means becomes indeed necessary 
once absolutely superhuman influences are stipulated. So I gladly 
concede to Schelling his main results of mythology in relation to 

Schelling and Revelation 229 

Christianity, only in a different way, inasmuch as I understand 
both phenomena not as having been brought into consciousness 
from outside, supernaturally, but as innermost products of consci- 
ousness, as purely human and natural. 

Now at last we arrive at the revelation, prepared by mythology. 
This is Christianity as a whole. Hence its philosophy does not have 
to be concerned with dogma, etc.; it does not itself intend to 
establish a doctrine, but only to explain the historical fact of 
Christianity. We shall see, however, how the whole dogmatic 
system gradually emerges. We shall see how Schelling regards 
“Christianity only as a fact, as also paganism”. The facts of 
paganism, as they appeared, he did not regard as true; he did not 
take Dionysus, for instance, for a real God; those of Christianity, 
by contrast, are to him absolute; when Christ declares himself the 
Messiah, when Paul claims this or that, Schelling believes him 
unconditionally. Schelling explained the mythological facts, at least 
in his own fashion; those of Christianity he asserts. And with all 
this he flatters himself 

“to have won the love of youth by his straightforwardness and frankness, nay, 
not only its love, but also its enthusiasm”. 

In order to explain revelation he proceeds from a passage in 
Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, Ch. 2: 6-8, which I here quote: 

“(Christ Jesus], being in the form of God {év popgy Geos], thought it not 
robbery [apnaypa]to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation 
[éxev@oe], and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness 

of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became 
obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” 

Without entering into the extensive exegetical discussions with 
which Schelling accompanied his philosophical explanation I will 
here merely recount in Schelling’s own manner the fact told by 
Paul. In his state of suffering Christ had gradually become master 
of consciousness through the mythological process. He posses- 
sed his own world independently of the Father and could do 
with it what he wished. He was the God of the world, but not 
the absolute God. He could persist in this extra-divine-divine 
state. Paul calls this: being in the form of God, évpopgi deos. But 
he did not want this. He became man, divested himself of his 
glory to surrender it to the Father and thus to unite the world 
with God. Had he not done so, there would no longer have been 
any possibility for the world to unite with God. This is the true 
significance of Christ’s obedience. The story of the temptation is 
also to be explained in this sense. The adversary, the blind cosmic 
principle, has been brought to the point where he offers his realm 

to Christ, if he will worship him, i. e., will himself remain cosmic 
power, év poppy eos. Christ, however, rejects this possibility and 
surrenders his being to the Father by making it creature-like and 
becoming man. 

“God preserve me from deducing as Christian philosophical 
doctrines of which Christianity knows nothing,” aia con- 
cluded this deduction. To dispute about the Christianity of these 
doctrines would be a luxury, for even if it were proved, nothing 
would yet be gained for Schelling. In my view, however, they 
contradict the entire basic outlook of Christianity. It is no great art 
to prove the most abnormal thing by single passages from the 
Bible, but this is in no way the point here. Christianity is nearly 
two thousand years old and has had time enough to come to itself. 
Its content is expressed in the church, and it is impossible that any 
other positive content of significance is still concealed in it, or that 
its true meaning has only now been understood. In any case it 
would now be too late. But apart from that, there is still enough 
that is edifying in the above explanation. Was it a free act of 
Christ to surrender himself to the Father? Impossible, it was a 
natural necessity. We cannot stipulate the possibility of evil in 
Christ without destroying his divinity. He who can do evil can 
never become God. How in any case can one become God? But 
supposing now that Christ had kept the world for himself? One 
cannot imagine so absurd, comical a state of affairs as that which 
would have resulted. Here is Christ living gloriously and jovfully 
in his beautiful world, the flower of Hellenism in heaven and on 
earth, and there is the old God, lonely and childless, grieving over 
the failure of the trick against the world. The main fault of 
Schelling’s God is that He has more luck than intelligence. 
Everything went well in fact, but it could have turned out very 
differently. Altogether, Schelling’s doctrine of God is thoroughly 
anthropopathic. If the devil had offered the dominion of the 
world to Christ before he became man, he would at least have had 
the prospect of winning him, and who knows what would have 
happened; but once Christ had become man he had thereby 
already entered into his submission to God, and all hope was lost 
for the poor devil. Besides, had not Christ already gained the 
dominion of the world in the mythological process; what then 
could the devil still offer him? 

Herewith the gist of what Schelling says in explanation of 
Christianity has been given. The rest consists partly of quotations 
and their interpretations, partly of detailed analysis of the deduc- 
tions. Of these I will give the more important. 

Schelling and Revelation 231 

According to the earlier doctrine of the succession of the powers 
in the dominion of the world, it can be explained how each time 
the dominating power is the herald of the next. Thus in the Old 
Testament the Father prophesies the Son, in the New, the Son 
prophesies the Spirit. In the prophetic books this is reversed, and 
the third power foretells the second. Here a progression of the 
powers with time is now revealed, in particular in the “Jehovah of 
Malachi”, the “Angel of the Lord” who, although not directly the 
second person, is yet the second power, the cause of the appear- 
ance of the second power in B. He is a different one at different 
times, so that the age of each book can be judged by the manner 
of his appearance, and thus from the progression of the powers 
the most “amazing” results can be achieved, surpassing everything 
yet accomplished by criticism. This determinant is “the key to the 
Old Testament from which the reality of the concepts of the Old 
Testament is to be demonstrated in their relative truth”. 

The Old Testament has its basis and its premises in common 
with paganism. Hence the pagan element in so many Mosaic . 
customs. Thus circumcision is evidently merely a milder form of 
castration, which plays such a great part in the most ancient 
paganism and mimically and symbolically represents the conquest 
of Uranus, the oldest God, by the subsequent stage. So also the 
food taboos, the institution of the Tabernacle, which recalls 
Egyptian sanctuaries just as the Ark of the Covenant recalls the 
sacred chest of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. 

The appearance of Christ is not accidental, but predestined. 
The Roman era was the dissolution of mythology, for it absorbed 
into itself all religious concepts of the world even to the oldest 
Oriental religions without itself offering any new elements, and 
thus showed that it was incapable of producing anything new. At 
the same time, there arose out of the emptiness of these moribund 
forms a presentiment that something new must come. The world 
remained still and awaited the things to come. From this outward 
Roman world empire, from this destruction of the nations, there 
arose the inner kingdom of God. When the time was fulfilled, God 
sent his Son. 

Christ, divesting himself of pope} e0%, the extra-divine being 
as divine, became man, thereby exercising most brightly and 
brilliantly the divinity which continued in him. That Christ became 
poor for our sakes does not mean his parting with his divinity, the 
non-usus of the latter, but the discarding of the poppy ei, 
the form of God. The divine essence remains in him. Only he could 
mediate, because he was from God and in human consciousness. 

Through his effect on paganism and Judaism the principle which 
hampered mankind and might possibly have negated it was not 
negated; only the symptoms, not the cause of the disease, were 
removed by the repeated sacrifices. The ill will of the Father 
could only be overcome by another will, stronger than it, than 
death, than any other will. No physical, only the moral overcoming 
of this will was admissible, and that through the greatest voluntary 
submission of the mediator in place of man. Man’s greatest 
voluntary submission was never wholly voluntary, that of the 
mediator, however, was free, without his will or his guilt free over 
against God. Hence the process through paganism so that the 
mediator could appear as the representative of consciousness. The 
taking of this decision was the greatest marvel of the divine mind. 

The physical side of the incarnation can, of course, not be made 
clear down to the smallest detail. The material possibility for this 
lies in himself. To be material means to serve as substance to a 
superior power, to be subject to it. When Christ thus submits to 
God, he becomes material over against Him. But only as a 
creature has he the right to be outside God. So he must become 
man. That which in the beginning was with God, and which 
dominated consciousness in paganism in the form of God, is given 
birth in Bethlehem as a man by a woman. The reconciliation had 
always been only subjective, hence subjective facts were sufficient. 
But here it was necessary to overcome the ill will of the Father, 
and this could only be achieved by an objective fact, the incarna- 
tion. 

With this the third power now enters as mediating personality. 
Christ is conceived of, i. e., by the power of, the Holy Ghost, but is 
not his Son. The demiurgic function passes over to the third 
power; its first manifestation is the material man Jesus. The 
second power is substance, the third that which gives it form. The 
process in question is extraordinary, materially inconceivable, but 
it can be grasped by a loftier comprehension. Christ took the 
substance of the incarnation from himself. This first form, the 
nature of which does not further concern us here, was received 
into the organic process of the mother. To ask more questions 
would be more than micrology. 

When God works anywhere with His will, that is a miracle. In 
nature nothing has will. Neither has Christ. The demiurgic 
function belongs to him natura sua, without his will, hence he 
cannot discard it when he is man; here this function becomes the 
guide of his will. It depends on the will of the Father that the Son 
with his will is in nature, hence the Son works the miracles by 

Schelling and Revelation 233 

virtue of the Father. He who reads the New Testament after these 
lectures, will find there much that he has not previously seen. 
The death of Christ had been decided even before the incarna- 
tion and approved by Christ and Father. It was then no accident, 
but a sacrifice demanded by the divine mind. It was necessary in 
order to deprive the evil principle of all its might, to overcome it 
in its power. Only the mediating power could achieve this, but 
not by counterposing itself as a purely natural power to the 
former. But since God Himself desired that principle to be 
overcome, the second power had to submit to it. For in the eyes of 
God the second power, being natural, is worth no more than that 
which negates God, even if it did not become natural through its 
own fault, but through the fault of man. This last circumstance 
also gives it a certain right thus to be outside God. God is so just 
that He does not unilaterally annul the opposing principle, nay, 
He is so human that He loves this basically merely accidental 
element which gave Him the possibility to be as God more than 
He loves the necessary element, the power out of Himself. He is as 
much the God of the contrary principle as that of the second 
power. This is His nature, which stands even above His will. This 
singleness of all principles is His divine majesty and this does not 
allow that principle to be unilaterally broken. If it is to be 
annulled, it 1s necessary for the second power to precede it and in 
its extra-divine being to submit to God completely. Here the 
incarnation could not yet suffice. Immediately after the Fall, 
Christ followed man into estrangement from God and placed him- 
self between the world and God. By taking up a position on the side 
of the contrary principle, he opposed the Father, came into tension 
with him, shared the guilt of that being and as guiltlessly guilty, as 
guarantor of the being estranged from God, had to suffer the 
punishment. Christ atoned in death for thus placing himself on a 
level with the contrary principle by taking upon himself the sins of 
the world. This is the reason for his death. Other men indeed die 
too, but he died a very different death from theirs. This death is a 
miracle which we would not dare believe at all were it not so 
certain. All humanity was present in its representatives at his 
death: Jews and pagans attended it. The principle of the pagans 
had to die the death of the pagans, the death on the cross—in 
this, of course, nothing special 1s to be seen. The crucifixion was 
the solution of the prolonged tension? in which Christ had found 

* In the German text there is 2 pun on the words Ausspannung (stretching out) 
and Spannung (tension).— Ed. 

himself in paganism, as it is written that by death he was relieved 
of the judgment and the fear (i. e., the tension). This is the great 
secret which to this day is a scandal to the Jews (the moralists) and 
a folly to the pagans (the merely rational). 

The resurrection of Christ has always been regarded as a 
guarantee of personal immortality. On this teaching, apart from 
the resurrection of Christ, the following must be remarked. In this 
life nature dominates spirit, and it therefore presupposes another, 
in which this state of affairs is compensated for by the domination 
of spirit over nature, and a third and last in which the two 
elements balance each other and are in harmony. So far 
philosophy has had no satisfying purpose for immortality; here, in 
Christianity, it is given. 

The resurrection of Christ is itself proof of the irrevocability of 
his incarnation. In it human being is again accepted by God. Not 
any single deed of man displeased God, but the entire condition in 
which man found himself, and therefore also the individual, even 
before he had sinned. Hence no human will, no deed could be 
really good until the Father was reconciled. In Christ’s resurrec- 
tion this condition is acknowledged by God, joy is restored to the 
world. Hence the justification was only completed in the resurrec- 
tion inasmuch as Christ was not dissolved in the universe but sits as 
man on God’s right hand. The resurrection is a stroke of lightning 
from inner history to outer. Whoever takes it away has only the 
external without divine content, without that transcendental which 
alone turns history into history; he has a mere fact of memory 
and stands there like the great mass before the events of the 
day whose inner workings are unknown to him. Moreover, he 
goes to hell, i. e., “the moment of dying stretches for him into 
eternity”. 

In the end, the Holy Ghost comes and concludes all. He can 
only descend after the Father is completely reconciled and his 
coming is the sign that this has taken place. 

Here Schelling interpolated his judgment on the latest criticism 
since Strauss. It had never been able, he said, to tempt him into 
any sort of polemic, as he had proved by always giving these 
lectures in the same way, without additions, since 1831. He dated 
the philosophy of mythology even farther back. Then he spoke of 
the “trivial, eminently philistine mind” of these people, of their 
“schoolboyish treatment of incomplete propositions”, of the “im- 
potence of their philosophy”, etc. By contrast, he had nothing to 
Say against pietism and purely subjective Christianity, except that 
it was not the only kind nor the highest. 

Schelling and Revelation 235 

Shall I also give excerpts from the satanology? The devil is 
neither personal nor impersonal, he is a power; the evil angels are 
powers, they are such as should not be,but were posited by the fall 
of man; the good angels are also powers, they are such as should 
be and through the fall of man are not. That is enough for the 
present. 

The church and its history have developed from the three 
apostles Peter, James (with his successor Paul) and John. Neander 
is of the same view. The Catholic Church, the conservative, the 
Jewishly-formal, is that of Peter, the Protestant that of Paul, and 
the third, still to be expected and presumably prepared by 
Schelling, that of John, who combines in himself the simplicity of 
Peter with the dialectical acumen of Paul. Peter represents the 
Father, Paul the Son, John the Holy Ghost. 

“To those whom the Lord loves he gives the task of completion. If I had to 
build a church, I would build it for St. John. Some day, however, a common 

church will be built for all three apostles, and that will be the true Christian 
pantheon.” 

That is the main content of Schelling’s lectures, as far as it could 
be made out by comparing three notebooks. I am conscious of 
having proceeded with the greatest sincerity and candour. Here 
we have the entire dogma: the Trinity, the creation from nothing, 
the fall of man, original sin and the impotence to do good, the 
reconciliation through the death of Chnist, the resurrection, the 
descent of the Holy Ghost, the community of the Saints, the 
resurrection of the dead and eternal life. Thus Schelling himself 
negates the separation of fact and dogma which he had stipulated. 
But if we look at the matter more closely, is this Christianity still 
the old one? If you approach it without prejudice you will have to 
say: Yes and No. The irreconcilability of philosophy and Christian- 
ity has gone so far that even Schelling falls into a still worse 
contradiction than Hegel. The latter had at least a philosophy, 
even if the outcome was only an apparent Christianity; by contrast, 
what Schelling produces is neither Christianity nor philosophy, 
and his passing it off for both is the measure of his “straight- 
forwardness and frankness”, of the merit that “to those who asked 
him for bread he gave real bread, not a stone, while saying it was 
bread”. That Schelling does not know himself in the least is again 
proved by the speech from which these words are taken. Such a 
doctrine again really brings home to one how weak are the 
foundations on which modern Christianity rests. 

If we once more review this doctrine in its entirety, in addition 
to what has already been said we obtain also the following results 

Q* 

for the definition of the neo-Schellingian manner of thinking. The 
confusion of freedom and arbitrariness is in full flower. God is 
always conceived as acting in a humanly arbitrary fashion. This is 
indeed necessary so long as God is conceived as single, but it is not 
philosophical. Only that freedom is genuine which contains necessi- 
ty, nay, which is only the truth, the reasonableness of necessity. 
Therefore Hegel’s God cannot now or ever be a single person, 
since everything arbitrary has been removed from Him. Therefore 
when he speaks of God, Schelling has to employ “free” thinking, 
for the necessary thinking of logical inference excludes any kind 
of divine person. The Hegelian dialectic, this mighty, never resting 
driving force of thought, is nothing but the consciousness of 
mankind in pure thinking, the consciousness of the universal, 
Hegel’s consciousness of God. Where, as with Hegel, everything 
produces itself, a divine personality is superfluous. 

Furthermore, another contradiction is revealed in the division of 
philosophy. If the negative philosophy is without all reference to 
existence, “there is no logical necessity” that it should not also 
contain things which do not occur in the real world. Schelling 
admits this when he says of it that it is not concerned with the 
world, and that if the world agrees with its constructions, this is 
accidental. In this way, however, negative philosophy becomes 
quite empty and hollow, wandering around in the most arbitrary 
possibility and flinging its doors wide open to fantasy. On the 
other hand, however, if it contains only what is real in nature and 
spirit, it, of course, includes reality and the positive philosophy is 
superfluous. This is to be seen also from the other side. Nature 
and spirit are for Schelling all that is rational. God is not rational. 
So here also it is shown that the infinite can only rationally exist in 
reality when it appears as finite, as nature and spirit, and that any 
other-worldly, extra-mundane existence of the infinite must be 
relegated to the realm of abstractions. That particular positive 
philosophy depends entirely on faith, as we have seen, and exists 
only for faith. If now a Jew or Mohammedan accepts Schelling’s 
premises in the negative science, he will necessarily also have to 
fashion for himself a Jewish or Mohammedan positive philosophy. 
Indeed, it will differ even for Catholicism and for the Anglican 
Church. All are equally justified, for “it is not dogma that matters, 
but fact”. And the so beloved “free” thinking allows everything to 
be construed as absolute. Particularly in Mohammedanism, the 
facts are far better construed than in Christianity. 

So we have come to the end of Schelling’s philosophy and can 
only regret that such a man should have become so caught in the 

Schelling and Revelation 937 

snares of faith and unfreedom. He was different when he was still 
young. Then there arose from the ferment of his brain forms as 
radiant as Pallas, of which many a one forged to the front also in 
later struggles; then freely and boldly he sailed into the open sea 
of thought to? discover Atlantis, the absolute, whose image he had - 
so often seen rising from the distant horizon of the sea like a 
dreamily shimmering fata morgana; then all the fire of youth broke 
from him in flames of enthusiasm; a prophet drunk with God, he 
foretold a new era; carried away by the spirit which came over 
him, he often did not know himself the meaning of his words. He 
tore wide open the doors to philosophising so that the breath of 
nature wafted freshly through the chambers of abstract thought 
and the warm rays of spring fell on the seed of the categories and 
awakened all slumbering forces. But the fire burnt itself out, the 
courage vanished, the fermenting new wine turned into sour 
vinegar before it could become clear wine. The bold ship dancing 
joyfully through the waves turned back and entered the shallow 
haven of faith, ran its keel so fast into the sand that it is still stuck 
there. There it lies, and nobody recognises in the old, frail wreck 
the old ship which went out with all sails spread and flags flying. 
The sails have long since rotted, the masts are broken, the waves 
pour in through the gaping planks, and every day the tides pile 
up more sand around the keel. 

Let us turn away from this. waste of time. There are finer things 
for us to contemplate. No one will want to show us this wreck and 
claim that it alone is a seaworthy vessel while in another port an 
entire fleet of proud frigates lies at anchor, ready to put out to the 
high seas. Our salvation, our future, lies elsewhere. Hegel is the 
man who opened up a new era of consciousness by completing the 
old. It is curious that just now he is being attacked from two sides, 
by his predecessor Schelling and by his youngest follower Feuer- 
bach. When the latter charges Hegel with being stuck deeply in 
the old, he should consider that consciousness of the old is already 
precisely the new, that the old is relegated to history precisely 
when it has been brought completely into consciousness. So Hegel 
is indeed the new as old, the old as new. And so Feuerbach’s 
critique of Christianity is a necessary complement to the specula- 
tive teaching on religion founded by Hegel. This has reached its 
peak in Strauss, through its own history the dogma dissolves 
objectively in philosophical thought. At the same time Feuerbach 
reduces the religious categories to subjective human relations, and 

* In the pamphlet there is a misprint: und (and) instead of um (to).— Ed. 

thereby does not by any means annul the results achieved by 
Strauss, but on the contrary puts them to the real test and in fact 
both come to the same result, that the secret of theology is 
anthropology. 

A fresh morning has dawned, a world-historic morning, like the 
one in which the bright, free, Hellenic consciousness broke out of 
the dusk of the Orient. The sun has risen greeted with smiles by 
sacrificial fires on all the mountain peaks, the sun, whose coming 
was announced in ringing fanfares from every watch-tower, whose 
light mankind was anxiously awaiting. We are awakened from long 
slumber, the nightmare which oppressed us has fled, we rub our 
eyes and look around us in amazement. Everything has changed. 
The world that was so alien to us, nature whose hidden forces 
frightened us like ghosts, how familiar, how homely they now 
are! The world which appeared to us like a prison now shows 
itself in its true form, as a magnificent royal palace in which we all 
go in and out, poor and rich, high and low. Nature opens up 
before us and calls to us: Do not flee from me, I am not depraved, 
I have not fallen away from the truth; come and see, it is your 
own inmost and truest essence which gives also to me the fulness 
of life and the beauty of youth! Heaven has come down to earth, 
its treasures lie scattered like stones on the road-side, whoever de- 
sires them has but to pick them up. All confusion, all fear, all divi- 
sion has vanished. The world is again a whole, independent and 
free; it has burst open the doors of its dank cloister, has thrown 
off its sackcloth and chosen the free, pure ether to dwell in. No 
longer does it have to justify itself to unreason, which could not 
grasp it; its splendour and glory, its fulness and strength, its life 
is its justification. He was surely right who eighteen hundred years 
ago divined that the world, the cosmos, would one day push him 
aside, and bade his disciples renounce the world. 

And man, the dearest child of nature, a free man after the long 
battles of youth, returning to his mother after the long estrange- 
ment, protecting her against all the phantoms of enemies slain in 
battle, has overcome also the separation from himself, the division 
in his own breast. After an inconceivably long age of wrestling and 
striving, the bright day of self-consciousness has risen for him. 
Free and strong he stands there, confident in himself and proud, 
for he has fought the battle of battles, he has overcome himself 
and pressed the crown of freedom on his head. Everything has 
become revealed to him and nothing had the strength to shut 
itself up against him. Only now does true life open to him. What 
formerly he strove towards in obscure presentiment, he now 

Schelling and Revelation 239 

attains with complete, free will. What seemed to lie outside him, in 
the hazy distance, he now finds in himself as his own flesh and 
blood. He does not care that he has bought it dearly, with his 
heart’s best blood, for the crown was worth the blood; the long time 
of wooing is not lost to him, for the noble, splendid bride whom 
he leads into the chamber has only become the dearer to him for 
it; the jewel, the holy thing he has found after long searching was 
worth many a fruitless quest. And this crown, this bride, this holy 
thing is the self-consciousness of mankind, the new Grail' round 
whose throne the nations gather in exultation and which makes 
kings of all who submit to it, so that all splendour and might, all 
dominion and power, all the beauty and fulness of this world lie at 
their feet and must yield themselves up for their glorification. 
This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, 
gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives 
joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand- 
year reign of freedom. And such is the power of the Idea that he 
who has recognised it cannot cease to speak of its splendour or to 
proclaim its all-conquering might, that in gaiety and good heart he 
gives up all else at its bidding, that he sacrifices body and soul, life 
and property in order that it and it alone shall triumph. He who 
has once beheld it, to whom in the nightly stillness of his little 
room it has once appeared in all its brightness, can never abandon 
it, he must follow where it leads, even to death. For he knows that 
it is stronger than everything in heaven and on earth, that it fights 
its way through against all enemies. And this belief in the 
all-conquering might of the Idea, in the victory of eternal truth, 
this firm confidence that it can never waver or yield, even if the 
whole world were to rise against it, that is the true religion of 
every genuine philosopher, that is the basis of the true positive 
philosophy, the philosophy of world history. This is the supreme 
revelation, that of man to man, in which all negation of criticism is 
positive. This press and storm of nations and heroes over which | 
the Idea hovers in eternal peace and at last comes down into the 
midst of the turmoil and becomes its inmost, most living, self- 
conscious soul, that is the source of all salvation and all deliver- 
ance; that is the realm in which each one of us in his place has to 
work and act. The Idea, the self-consciousness of mankind, is that 
wonderful phoenix who builds for himself a funeral pyre out of 
all that is most precious in the world and rises rejuvenated from 
the flames which destroy an old time. 

So let us carry to this phoenix on the funeral pyre all that is 
most dear to us and most beloved, all that was sacred and great 

for us before we were free! Let us not think any love, any gain, 
any riches too great to sacrifice gladly to the Idea — it will repay us 
everything a thousandfold! Let us fight and bleed, look undis- 
mayed into the grim eye of the enemy and hold out to the end! 
Do you see our flags wave from the mountain peaks? Do you see 
the swords of our comrades glinting, the plumes on the helmets 
fluttering? They are coming, they are coming, from all valleys, 
from all heights they are streaming towards us with song and the 
call of trumpets; the day of the great decision, of the battle of the 
nations, is approaching, and victory must be ours!