Schelling, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH (afterwards von Schelling), was born at Leonberg in Württemberg, 27th January 1775; studied theology and philosophy at Tübingen; then (1796) science and mathematics at Leipzig; began his career as a teacher of philosophy in the university of Jena in 1798 as successor to Fichte, from which time he was, with Fichte and Hegel, one of the pioneers of post-Kantian speculative thought. In 1803 he married Carolina (1763-1809), the divorced wife of A. W. von Schlegel (q.v.). From 1803 to 1808 he was professor at Würzburg; then until 1820 secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts at Munich; again professor at Erlangen until 1827, when he returned to Munich to the new university there; and was finally called in 1841 by Frederick-William IV. to Berlin amid great expectation of results from his long-promised final, positive philosophy. He died at the baths of Ragaz in Switzerland, 20th August 1854.
Schelling's significance consists not in his being the founder of a philosophical system, but in his having by the force of his genius and prolonged fervid activity lived into and through the speculative questions of his day, condensing them into profound intuitions and thoughts which not only excited others to systematic thinking, but entered into the philosophical development as landmarks of speculation. His manifold productions may be grouped around the leading ideas of three distinct periods, the first of which extends from 1797 to 1800, when Schelling was under the influence chiefly of Fichte, and embraces the so-called 'Philosophy of Nature' and 'Transcendental Philosophy'; the second culminates in the 'Philosophy of Identity,' and falls between 1801 and 1803, Schelling's lights being then Spinoza and Boehme; the third and least valuable of the three represents the growth of what Schelling called his Positive (in opposition to the previous Critical or Negative) Philosophy, and may be traced as far back as 1809, when The Inquiry into the Nature of Human Freedom appeared. Schelling began as an adherent of Fichte's principle of the Ego as the supreme principle of philosophy: the Ego alone cannot be explained by anything outside itself; it posits itself and is conditioned only by itself—i.e. in it form and matter coincide; such are the ideas of his first production, On the Possibility of any Form of Philosophy (1795). In the next work, On the Ego as Principle of Philosophy, Schelling seems to make the transition to the Absolute Ego as the ground of the opposition between the Ego and Non-Ego, and thus arrives at the pantheism characteristic of the idealism of Fichte and Hegel. In the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1796-98) he sets at naught Kant's arguments for the limitation of knowledge to phenomena, in laying claim to a 'secret wonderful faculty which dwells in us all' of beholding the transcendental ground of all reality, which he calls 'Intellectual Intuition'—a conception to be associated with the Reason or faculty of ideas of Spinoza and Kant and Plato, and with the intuition of the mystics. This notable doctrine, though resting on some basis of psychological experience (such, for example, as the 'Consensus Gentium' talked of in theistic proof or the 'Faith' of Jacobi), is apt to be either vague or presumptuous; the former as it hardly admits of exact definition, and the latter as it is apt to look like a claim to a private view of truth which may not be enjoyed by everybody.
In the Philosophy of Nature writings, and in The World-Soul (1797-99), we find Schelling supplementing the Fichtian doctrine of the Ego or Absolute Ego, by showing that the whole of Nature may be regarded as an embodiment of a process by which Spirit tends to rise to a consciousness of itself—that in fact we may supplement Subjective Idealism by an Objective Idealism in which Nature is seen to be the other pole of Spirit, slumbering or petrified intelligence. We might therefore say: 'I is everything, because everything is I.' Because of this affinity with Spirit that Nature has we may, thought Schelling, construct a 'Philosophy of Nature'—i.e. we can say what Nature is prior to actual empirical research—and we find him trying to explain Nature by a logical manipulation of such opposites as Self and Not-Self, attraction and repulsion, and such principles as polarity, excitability, light, &c. The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), one of the most important of Schelling's works, speaks of the two fundamental and complementary sciences, Transcendental Philosophy and Speculative Physics, which together constitute the whole of knowledge; the one starts with the Subjective and shows how the Objective belongs thereto, while the other shows how the Objective must become Subjective. Schelling about this time edited two journals, the one for Speculative Physics, and the other (with Hegel) the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which not only contain some important articles of his own, but express at a stage of white heat the movement of thought which can only be said to culminate in the stupendous system of Hegel. It is easy to see in the Transcendental Idealism the germ of the 'Philosophy of Identity.' If either Spirit or Nature conduct us to the unity which Philosophy seeks, the metaphysical ground of Being may be viewed as a supra-sensuous Identity that is above all difference: the Absolute as the unity of the Ideal and the Real is higher than either Spirit in itself or Nature in itself, and Spirit Philosophy and Nature Philosophy merge in Identity Philosophy, the theory of the One which is above dualism and multiplicity. Following Spinoza, Schelling teaches (Method of Academic Study, 1803; Bruno, 1803, &c.) that it is only the imagination and the reflecting Understanding which cause us to separate things or conceive them separately; Reason beholds all things in their totality or oneness; the Absolute is not only the unity of all contradictions, but the unity of unity and itself unendingness. We here see the roots of the Dialectic or Logic of Hegel, who, however, is careful to avoid, as the grave of thought, a mere formal identity (i.e. to say that the Absolute is that which is one with itself is to say practically nothing about it) and to set forth a unity which is concrete (i.e. a unity in which all variety persists and is not lost). Schelling differs though from Spinoza in keeping the process of development strongly to the fore as indeed the truth of the world ('In the beginning was the Act,' in Goethe's words), a most valuable side of his philosophy, linking it through disciples of his with the tremendous development of the historic method in the 19th century; and again in tending to make Spirit the chief factor in the world process. In the Identity Philosophy Schelling repeats a good deal of the Natural Philosophy, and the weakest part of his system (only possible in the infancy of science) is his partly rational and partly fantastical and merely verbal construction of nature in the so-called a priori way.
The fact that Schelling could never describe to himself his Absolute save in the most formal way left his mind open to the influence of mystical speculation; he could never think exactly to himself how the finite arose out of its dark, infinite background, a question with which he occupied himself in the Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. In the latter treatise what he chiefly does is to translate into language of Reason such truths of Revelation as that of the Trinity, under which God the Father is seen to go out of Himself to the creation of a world; in some such way by an eternal act before all time man made himself what he is, and ever asserts his freedom until by another eternal act he unites himself to God, and thus brings the world back to God and becomes its Redeemer. The promised Positive Philosophy which was to advance beyond merely negative or critical philosophy came to be simply the philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. What Schelling objected to in the philosophy of Hegel was its attempt to extract all out of the Idea or Reason; there must he thought be something like Will, or Tendency, or Process to account for the illogical and finite aspect of some things, a fact which turned his mind to Nature as the forefront to Spirit, and connects his philosophy with the strange system of Schopenhauer, which is a pantheism of the Will, as Hegel's philosophy may be called a pantheism of the Idea, and Schelling's of the Spirit. It was in keeping with the mystical character of Schelling's mind that he should look forward to a Johannine church of the future rising over the ruins of Petrinism and Paulinism.
A full account of Schelling will be found in any of the larger histories of Philosophy, such as those of Erdmann (Eng. trans. by Hough, 3 vols. 1889) and Kuno Fischer. Morell, in his History of Modern Philosophy, is largely influenced throughout by Schelling, and gives, of course, an account of him. See also Watson's Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (Grigg's Classics, Chicago, 1883); A. Seth's Kant to Hegel; Frantz, Schellings Positive Philosophy; Hartmann, Studien u. Aufsätze; D. Marheineke, Criticism of Schellings's Philosophy of Revelation (1843); Pfeiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. ii.; works on Schelling by Noack (1859), H. Becker (1875); and the biographical Aus Schellings Leben: in Briefen, ed. by Plitt (3 vols. 1870).