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