Excerpt from The Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 2: On the Basis of Its History

From this point of View there arose new tasks for philosophy; the attempt had to be made to recognise in nature the unconscious shaping of mind, striving after consciousness and freedom through the various stages of organisation and on the other hand, to trace in the historical life of mind the process by which it extricates itself from its original entanglement in nature, and comes to itself; and then, further, how it again makes good its breach with nature, and restores its original unity with her in a higher form as its own free product. Thus we have the three principal parts of philosophy - the philo sophy of Nature, of History, and of Art and Religion. These are treated connectedly in the System of Transcendental Idealism which is the most complete of Schelling's writings. In this work the subject of religion is only briefly touched upon at the close of the History of Philosophy; but the suggestions thrown out are in teresting both in themselves and as the germs of thought put for ward at a later period, and we shall do well to notice them.

Schelling's mind is already busy with the problem of liberty in its relation to the necessity, the law, and the purpose of the world order; to this problem he is already seeking a solution drawn from ultimate metaphysical principles. That the entirely lawless play of freedom, which every free being is playing for itself, as if no other being existed by its side, should yet issue in a result which is reasonable and connected - and that this is so, I am obliged to take for granted in every act I do - is a thing quite incomprehensible if it be not the case that the objective is in all acting something com mon, by which all the acts of men are guided to one harmonious end, so that, however they indulge their own caprices, they yet bring about, without and against their will, by a necessity which is hidden from their eyes, a development of the drama which they themselves were far from intending. This necessity can only be thought by an absolute synthesis of all the acts by which the whole of history unrolls itself, a synthesis in which all is estimated and calculated beforehand in such a way that, however contradictory and dishar monious it may appear, it yet has and finds in it its basis of unity. Such a synthesis or pre-established harmony of the subjective and the objective, the conscious and the unconscious, the free and the necessary, must have its ground in a Higher, which transcends both, which can be neither of the two, but only the absolute identity of both. The Eternal Unconscious is, on the one hand, the invisible root of all intelligences and the ground of the law-observance they exhibit in the midst of their freedom but itself cannot be denoted by any predicates taken from the world of intelligence and freedom, since it is the absolutely Simple, which for that reason can never be an object of knowledge, but only of presupposition in action, i.e. Of faith.

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