'If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making objective and universally accepted what the philosopher can only exhibit subjectively, it may also be expected that philosophy, as it was in the infancy of science born and nourished by poetry, and with it all those sciences which were by it carried on towards perfection, will after their completion flow back as so many single streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they issued. Nor is it in general hard to say what will be the means for the return of science to poetry: for such a means has existed in mythology before this, as it now seems, irrevocable separation took place. But as to how a new mythology,--which cannot be the invention of the single poet, but of a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet,--can itself arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be expected only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of history[16].'
[Footnote 1: Schelling, _Werke_, iii. 13. (References always to the first series.)]
[Footnote 2: Schelling, _Werke,_ ii. 409.]
[Footnote 3: Schelling, _Werke_, ii. 500.]
[Footnote 5: Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.]
[Footnote 6: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.]
[Footnote 7: 'Every inquiry into the influence of general nature on living beings,' says Treviranus, 'must start from the principle that all living forms are products of physical influences which still go on at the present time and are altered only in degree and direction.']
[Footnote 8: Schelling, _Werke_, iii. 63.]
[Footnote 9: Hegel, _Encyclopaedie,_ § 249.]
[Footnote 10: See e. g. Professor Michael Fosters article on Physiology in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._]
Thus far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two sides of philosophy had been alternately presented as complementary to each other; and now the task lay before him to publish the System itself which formed the basis of those complementary views. To that task Schelling set himself in 1801 (in his Journal for Speculative Physics): but the _Darstellung meines Systems_ remained a torso. The Absolute was abruptly 'shot from the pistol': but little followed save a restatement in new terms of the Philosophy of Nature. Meanwhile Hegel, who had inherited some little means by his father's death, began to think that the hour had struck for his entrance into the literary and philosophical arena, and wrote in the end of 1800 to Schelling asking his aid in finding a suitable place and desirable surroundings from which to launch himself into action. What answer or advice he received is unknown: at any rate in the early days of 1801 he took up his quarters at Jena, and in the autumn he gave his first lectures at the University. Gossip suggested that Schelling, left alone (since Fichte's departure) to sustain the onset of respectability and orthodoxy upon the extravagances of the new Transcendentalism, had summoned his countryman and old friend to bear a part in the fray. And the rumour seemed to receive corroboration. The two friends issued conjointly a _Critical Journal of Philosophy,_ which ran through two years. So closely were the two editors associated that in one article it seems as if the younger had supplied his more fluent pen to expound the ideas of his senior.