This individual is Jacob Boehme, for since mind now moves in its own domains, it is found partly in the natural and finite world, and partly in the inward, and this at first is the Christian. While earlier than this, moreover, the spirit, distracted by outward things, had to make its influence felt in religion and in the secular life, and came to be known in the popular philosophy so-called, it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the genuine Philosophy re-appeared, which seeks to grasp the truth as truth because man in thought is infinitely free to comprehend himself and nature, and along with that seeks to understand the present of rationality, reality, universal law itself. For this is ours, since it is subjectivity. The principle of modern philosophy is hence not a free and natural thought, because it has the opposition of thought and nature before it as a fact of which it is conscious. Spirit and nature, thought and Being, are the two infinite sides of the Idea, which can for the first time truly make its appearance when its sides are grasped for themselves in their abstraction and totality. Plato comprehended it as the bond, as limiting and as infinite, as one and many, simple and diverse, but not as thought and Being; when we first thinkingly overcome this opposition it signifies comprehending the unity. This is the standpoint of philosophic consciousness generally; but the way in which this unity must be thinkingly developed is a double one. Philosophy hence falls into the two main forms in which the opposition is resolved, into a realistic and an idealistic system of philosophy, _i.e._ into one which makes objectivity and the content of thought to arise from the perceptions, and one which proceeds to truth from the independence of thought. a. Experience constitutes the first of these methods, viz. Realism. Philosophy now signified, or had as its main attribute, self-thought and the acceptance of the present as that in which truth lay, and which was thereby knowable. All that is speculative is pared and smoothed down in order to bring it under experience. This present is the existent external nature, and spiritual activity as the political world and as subjective activity. The way to truth was to begin from this hypothesis, but not to remain with it in its external self-isolating actuality, but to lead it to the universal.