Philosophy also assumed the character of the age. Fichte of Berlin still upheld, in 1814, the passion for liberty and right in their nobler sense that had been roused by the French Revolution, but, as he went yet further than Kant in setting limits to the sources of perception and denied the existence of conscience, his system proved merely of short duration. To him succeeded Schelling, with whom the return of philosophy to religion and that of abstract studies to nature and history commenced, and in whom the renovated spirit of the nineteenth century became manifest. His pupils were partly natural philosophers, who, like Oken, sought to comprehend all nature, her breathing unity, her hidden mysteries, in religion; partly mystics, who, like Eschenmaier, Schubert, Steffens, in a Protestant spirit, or, like Gorres and Baader, in a Catholic one, sought also to comprehend everything bearing reference to both nature and history in religion. It was a revival of the ancient mysticism of Hugo de St. Victoire, of Honorius, and of Rupert in another and a scientific age; nor was it unopposed: in the place of the foreign scholasticism formerly so repugnant to its doctrines, those of Schelling were opposed by a reaction of the superficial mock-enlightenment and sophistical scepticism predominant in the foregoing century, more particularly of the sympathy with France, which had been rendered more than ever powerful in Germany by the forcible suppression of patriotism. Abstract philosophy, despising nature and history, mocking Christianity, once more revived and set itself up as an absolute principle in Hegel. None of the other philosophers attained the notoriety gained by Schelling and Hegel, the representatives of the antitheses of the age.