Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling might well be dubbed "the philosopher of Romanticism." He was close to Friedrich Hölderlin, the Schlegels, Novalis, and Ludwig Tieck; he theorized about their central concerns, such as consciousness, mythology, religion, nature, and art; above all, in his early thinking he made the philosophy of art the "organon" of philosophy as a whole. But Schelling may be thought Romantic in yet another sense: he tended to promote one system after another, almost in fragments, as if (to quote Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's jibe) he were carrying on his philosophical education in public. Henry Crabb Robinson, a student at the University of Jena in the early 1800s, relates in his diary that one evening Schelling asked whether the serpent was not characteristic of English philosophy; Robinson replied that his countrymen thought it emblematically German, since it shed its coat each year. Schelling...