Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born in 1775 at Leonberg in Wuerttemberg.  His father was a clergyman.  He was precocious in his intellectual development and much spoiled by vanity.  Before he was twenty years old he had published three works upon problems suggested by Fichte.  At twenty-three he was extraordinarius at Jena.  He had apparently a brilliant career before him.  He published his Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophe, 1799, and also his System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 1800.  Even his short residence at Jena was troubled by violent conflicts with his colleagues.  It was brought to an end by his marriage with the wife of Augustus von Schlegel, who had been divorced for the purpose.  From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich in retirement.  The long-expected books which were to fulfil his early promise never appeared.  Hegel’s stricture was just.  Schelling had no taste for the prolonged and intense labour which his brilliant early works marked out.  He died in 1854, having reached the age of seventy-nine years, of which at least fifty were as melancholy and fruitless as could well be imagined.

The dominating idea of Schelling’s philosophy of nature may be said to be the exhibition of nature as the progress of intelligence toward consciousness and personality.  Nature is the ego in evolution, personality in the making.  All natural objects are visible analogues and counterparts of mind.  The intelligence which their structure reveals, men had interpreted as residing in the mind of a maker of the world.  Nature had been spoken of as if it were a watch.  God was its great artificer.  No one asserted that its intelligence and power of development lay within itself.  On the contrary, nature is always in the process of advance from lower, less highly organised and less intelligible forms, to those which are more highly organised, more nearly the counterpart of the active intelligence in man himself.  The personality of man had been viewed as standing over against nature, this last being thought of as static and permanent.  On the contrary, the personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these are at last seen in man.  Of course, it was the life of organic nature which first suggested this notion to Schelling.  An organism is a self-moving, self-producing whole.  It is an idea in process of self-realisation.  What was observed in the organism was then made by Schelling the root idea of universal nature.  Nature is in all its parts living, self-moving along the lines of its development, productivity and product both in one.  Empirical science may deal with separate products of nature.  It may treat them as objects of analysis and investigation.  It may even take the whole of nature as an object.  But nature is not mere object.  Philosophy has to treat of the inner life which moves the whole of nature as intelligible productivity, as subject, no longer as object.  Personality has slowly arisen out of nature.  Nature was going through this process of self-development before there were any men to contemplate it.  It would go through this process were there no longer men to contemplate it.