the final consummation. Schelling is no more than consistent when he accordingly apprehends the symbols of mythology which we meet with at the beginning of history, as disclosures of the highest wisdom. There is here also a step towards his subsequent “_Philosophy of Mythology_.” The mystical element revealed in these expressions of Schelling gained continually a greater prominence with him. Its growth was partly connected with his fruitless search after an absolute method, and a fitting form in which he might have satisfactorily expressed his philosophic intuitions. All noble mysticism rests on the incapacity of adequately expressing an infinite content in the form of a conception. So Schelling, after he had been restlessly tossed about in every method, soon gave up also his method of construction, and abandoned himself wholly to the unlimited current of his fancy. But though this was partly the cause of his mysticism, it is also true that his philosophical standpoint was gradually undergoing a change. From the speculative science of nature, he was gradually passing over more and more into the philosophy of mind, by which the determination of the absolute in his conception became changed. While he had previously determined the absolute as the indifference of the ideal and the real, he now gives a preponderance to the ideal over the real, and makes ideality the fundamental determination of the absolute. The first is the ideal; secondly, the ideal determines itself in itself to the real, and the real as such is the third. The earlier harmony of mind and matter is dissolved: matter appears now as the negative of mind. Since Schelling in this way distinguishes the universe from the absolute as its counterpart, we see that he leaves decidedly the basis of Spinozism on which he had previously stood, and places himself on a new standpoint. IV. FOURTH PERIOD: THE DIRECTION OF SCHELLING’S PHILOSOPHY AS MYSTICAL AND ALLIED TO NEW-PLATONISM.