An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon they historian as he surveys Schelling's career. Seldom had a thinker's life begun with better promise, and more distinguished performance; seldom had a nobler inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided and propelled the intellectual interest; seldom had expectation of greater things yet to come followed a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling. On one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the results of scientific discovery, at least in its more suggestive advances: on the other, a mastery of words and style which fitted him to hold his own amongst the literary leaders; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed to be religious, with the movement which sought _lucem ex Oriente_, and wisdom from the treasures of the world's purer youth. And yet--in the main--the net result, oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a great thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the remark that even books and thinkers have their fates, and that some momentary forgetfulness let the tide slip unused. But it is possible to be less oracularly-obscure: and without detracting from the splendid faculty and great achievement of Schelling to note some of the causes of his lapse into a mere episode.
In the first place, though his conception is of a system, his performance is only a succession of fragments. The nearest approach to an encyclopaedic exposition of his ideas is found in his popular _Lectures on the Studies of University._ More than once he starts on the task of exposition, but lets it break off about the middle. Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme of thought have slightly altered, and not merely does his philosophy profess at first to present two distinct sides, but these two sides of the shield vary. Thirdly, the interest in scientific novelties, always disposed to seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes on to fasten too greedily on the miraculous and mysterious night-side of nature, on magic powers and mystic discernments--a path which descends to the abyss of a 'positive,' i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy. The matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in Bavaria, and the Protestant theologian Paulus, once a friend, but latterly his bitterest foe) regard him as a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval obscurantism so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art renders him suspected: for there is an old quarrel between philosophy and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom is jealous of her gipsy rival. Ill-advised indications of a sense of lofty superiority to the average teacher increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents. Nor is it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to suggest that his first wife, Caroline, with all her wonderful attractions of intellect and character, and notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in encouragement and counsel, was too clever and too critical not to sow many jealousies, and to add through the female line to the ranks of those with whom he stood suspect.