identity of all things, and a potential presence of every thing in every other, and therefore even the so-called dead matter may be viewed only as a sleeping-world of animals and plants, which, in some period, the absolute identity may animate and raise to life. At this point Schelling stops suddenly, without developing further the three potences of the ideal series, corresponding to those of the real. Elsewhere he completes the work by setting up the following three potences of the ideal series: (1) Knowledge, the potence of reflection; (2) Action, the potence of subsumption; (3) the Reason as the unity of reflection and subsumption. These three potences represent themselves: (1) as the true, the imprinting of the matter in the form; (2) as the good, or the imprinting of the form in the matter; (3) as the beautiful, or the work of art, the absolute blending together of form and matter. Schelling sought also to furnish himself with a new method for knowing the absolute identity. Neither the analytic nor the synthetical method seems to him suitable for this, since both are only a finite knowledge. Gradually, also, he abandoned the mathematical method. The logical forms of the ordinary method of knowledge, and even the ordinary metaphysical categories, were now insufficient for him. Schelling now places the intellectual intuition as the starting point of true knowledge. Intuition, in general, is an equal positing of thought and being. When I behold an object, the being of the object and my thought of the object is for me absolutely the same. But in the ordinary intuition, some separate sensible being is posited as one with the thought. But in the intellectual or rational intuition, being in general, and every being is made identical with the thought, and the absolute _subject-object_ is beheld. The intellectual intuition is absolute knowledge, and as such it can only be conceived as that in which thought and being are not opposed to each other. It is the beginning and the first step towards philosophy to behold, immediately and intellectually within thyself, that same indifference of the ideal and the real which thou beholdest projected as it were from thyself in space and time. This absolutely absolute mode of knowledge is wholly and entirely in the absolute itself. That it can never become taught is clear. It cannot, moreover, be seen why philosophy is bound to have special regard to the unattainable. It seems much more fitting to make so complete a separation on every side between the entrance to philosophy and the common knowledge, that no road nor track shall lead from the latter to the former. The absolute mode of knowledge, like the truth which it contains, has no true opposition outside of itself, and as it cannot be demonstrated by any intelligent being, so nothing can be set up in opposition to it by any.—Schelling has attempted to bring the intellectual intuition into a method, and has named this method construction.