While engaged in the editorship of the Concordia, Schlegel gave a new edition of his works with considerable improvements and augmentations. Actively as his time had been employed, a long period had now elapsed since he had given any great production to the world; and he was now preparing those immortal works, which were to shed so bright an effulgence round the close of his life. In the rapid review which has been here taken of his critical, philological and historical writings, nothing has been said of his philosophical pursuits; and yet philosophy was his darling study--philosophy, which the ancients called "the science of divine and human things," was alone capable of filling the vast capacity of Schlegel's mind. At the age of nineteen, he had already read all the works of Plato in their original tongue; and six-and-thirty years afterwards, he expressed a vivid recollection of the delight and enthusiasm which the perusal had excited in his youthful mind. In 1800, he commenced his philosophical career at the University of Jena before an admiring audience; we have already seen him at Paris, amid his philological labours, devoting a portion of his time to the cultivation of philosophy; and, amid all the struggles and occupations of his subsequent life, he would ever and anon snatch some moment to pay his homage to this celestial maid--this mistress of his heart--this object of his earliest enthusiasm and latest worship.
A very distinguished friend and disciple of Schlegel's, the Baron d'Eckstein asserts that, towards the close of the last century, a confederacy was formed among some men of the most superior minds for the regeneration of natural science--for the revival of the lofty physics of remote antiquity, when nature was regarded only as the splendid and almost transparent veil of the spiritual world. The members of this intellectual association were Schelling, the two Schlegels, the poet Tirek, Novalis, and the celebrated geographer Ritter. This confederacy was dissolved, when the pantheistical tendency of Schelling's philosophy became more apparent; and Frederick Schlegel, in particular, became afterwards the most strenuous and formidable opponent of a philosophic system which appeared to him, and rightly enough, only a more subtle and refined Spinozism. On the true nature of this philosophy, however, opinion was much divided; many religious men among the Protestants ranged themselves under its banners; even some of the Orthodox entered into terms of accommodation with it; and the great Catholic theologian, Zimmer, thought that, by means of this system, he could obtain a clearer conception of the great Christian mystery of the Trinity. Enormous as may be the errors contained in this philosophy, yet, as few philosophic systems are entirely erroneous, the philosophy of Schelling, which appears to have undergone a purification in its course, has been attended with some beneficial results. It has led to a more profound and spiritual knowledge of nature--it has been, to many, a point of transition from the materialism and rationalism of the eighteenth century to the Christian Religion--and, indeed, this effect it has had on its illustrious founder himself, who has for some years returned to the bosom of Christianity, and who probably will be remembered by posterity more for his recent labours as a profound Christian naturalist, than for the pantheistic reveries of his youth.[21]