r0b’s Reviews > Schelling's Transcendental Idealism: A Critical Exposition > Status Update

...after Schelling had done his best to solve them and had in large measure failed, and were attacked anew with a vigor, pertinacity and originality that have never been excelled in any age. If in Hegel the pure light of philosophy does not shine, it may safely be said that it has not yet shone upon the earth.'

...Schelling in his later days committed himself to a mode of philosophizing, the form of which is radically unsound, valuable as its substance in many respects is; and that whatever is best in his system has been absorbed and superseded by a greater than he. The higher problems
of philosophy, as they were thrown down before the world by Kant, were taken up by Hegel, after Schelling had done his best to...

‘Nor, I hope, am I insensible to the great value of his lectures on Mythology and Revelation as contributions to the philosophy of religion, and as a powerful and, on the whole, beneficent incentive to the study of religion in its history. But I cannot refrain from saying that, with all his brilliancy, fertility and poetic insight, Schelling in his later days committed himself to a mode of philosophizing, the form...

...His system with its dead mechanical explanations may be compared to the statue of Pygmalion before it was quickened into life by the breath of love. This dead and motionless pantheism of Spinoza, spiritualized by idealism, is the true philosophy of nature...'

'The source of all his [Spinoza] mistakes is the assumption of the independent reality of things, an assumption which leads him to conceive even of God and the will as things outside of other things, and to regard each volition as the mechanical effect of a precedent cause, which again has a prior cause and so on to infinity...

...opposing nature and intelligence as two coordinate realms, each explicable by itself, we must hold that the former is simply a lower phase of the latter. In this way alone can we get rid of the dualism which, implicit in Kant and Fichte, is made explicit in Schelling.'

'...Fichte himself insists that knowledge and life are distinct; that
the former is a picture, the latter alone reality. Thus in Fichte we have implicitly the two elements which afford a relative justification for Schelling s contrast of intelligence and nature.'

'Comparatively short as the Transcendental Idealism is, it goes over in a sense the whole ground of philosophy. It is at once a metaphysic, a philosophy of nature, and a philosophy of spirit; or, more exactly, it sets forth the supreme conditions of knowable reality, the grades of nature, the phases of knowledge, the basis of ethics, the principles of art and the nature of religion.'

'It may be hoped that, even in the imperfect medium of a summary restatement, the stimulating and suggestive character of Schelling's Transcendental Idealism has been partially visible to the reader. Especially for those who desire to see the transition from Kant to Hegel made before their eyes, an acquaintance with that treatise is indispensable.'

'Neither the explanation of hylicism [materialism] nor of conscious teleology will bear examination. Both fail to account for the unconscious development of organic beings.'