The fundamental idea of natural philosophy is polarity--opposite forces combining to neutralise one another and then parting to be reunited at a higher stage of evolution. Thus attraction and repulsion--represented as space and time--by their synthesis compose matter; magnetism and electricity produce chemical affinity; life results from a triad of inorganic forces; in life itself productivity and irritability give birth to sensibility. The order of the terms made little, if any, difference. When long afterwards iron was magnetised by the electric current, Schelling claimed for himself the credit of anticipating this discovery, although he had placed magnetism before electricity. The next step was to construct a philosophy of history. This, with much else, is included under the name of _A System of Transcendental Idealism_ (1800) in the most finished of Schelling's literary compositions. {109} History, according to the view here unfolded, is the gradual self-revelation of God, or the Absolute, in whom Nature and Spirit are united and identified, who never is nor can be, but always is to be. Meanwhile the supreme ideal is not that ever-increasing mastery of nature by man which Fichte contemplated, but their reconciliation as achieved by Art. For just as natural philosophy carried an element of consciousness into the material universe, so æstheticism recognises a corresponding element of unconscious creation in the supreme works of artistic genius where spirit reaches its highest and best. Here Schelling appears as the philosopher of Romanticism, a movement that characterised German thought from 1795 to 1805, and is known to ourselves by the faded and feeble image of it exhibited in a certain section of English society nearly a century later. Beginning with a more cultivated intelligence of Hellenic antiquity, this movement rapidly grew into a new appreciation of medieval culture, falsely supposed to have given more scope to individuality than modern civilisation, and then into a search for ever-varying sources of excitement or distraction in the whole history, art, and literature of past or present times, religion being at last singled out as the vitalising principle of all.