too radical in the idealism of Fichte. He restored the external world; for
him the _non-ego_ and the _ego_ both exist and the two are
_nature_, nature which is the object in the world regarded by man, the
subject when it regards man, subject and object according to the case; in
itself and in its totality neither subject nor object, but absolute,
unlimited, indeterminate. Confronting this world (that is nature and man)
there is another world which is God. God is the infinite and the perfect,
and particularly the perfect and infinite will. The world that we know is a
debasement from that without our being able to conceive how the perfect can
be degraded, and how an emanation of the perfect can be imperfect and how
the non-being can come out of being, since relatively to the infinite, the
finite has no existence, and relatively to perfection, the imperfect is
nothing.

It appears however that it is thus, and that the world is an emanation of
God in which He degrades Himself and a degradation of God such that it
opposes itself to Him as nothing to everything. It is a fall. The fall of
man in the Scriptures may give an idea, however distant, of that.

HEGEL.--Hegel, a contemporary of Schelling, and often in
contradiction to him, is the philosopher of "_becoming_" and of the
idea which always "becomes" something. The essence of all is the idea, but
the idea in progress; the idea makes itself a thing according to a rational
law which is inherent in it, and the thing makes itself an idea in the
sense that the idea contemplating the thing it has become thinks it and
fills itself with it in order to become yet another thing, always following
the rational law; and this very evolution, all this evolution, all this
becoming, is that absolute for which we are always searching behind things,
at the root of things, and which is _in_ the things themselves.