Singularly enough, Fichte accepted the _Transcendental Idealism_ as an orthodox exposition of his own philosophy. But its composition seems to have given Schelling the consciousness of his own independence. Soon afterwards he defined the new position as a philosophy of Identity or of Indifference. Nature and Spirit, like Spinoza's Thought and Extension, were all the same and all one--that is to say, in their totality or in the Absolute. For, considered as appearances, {110} they might present quantitative differences determined by the varying preponderance of the objective or of the subjective side. In this way Schelling found himself able to repeat his fanciful construction of the forces and forms of nature in successive triads under new names. The essential departure from Fichte, who repudiated the Philosophy of Identity with undisguised contempt, was that it practically repudiated the idea of an eternal progress in man's ever-growing mastery of nature. But, in spite of all disclaimers, the master silently followed his former disciple's evolution in the direction of a pantheistic monism. His later writings represent God no longer as the moral order of the world, but, like Spinoza, as the world's eternal Being, of which man's knowledge is the reflected image. Finally, both philosophers accepted the Christian doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Trinity as mythical symbols of an eternal process in which God, after becoming alienated from himself in the material universe, returns to himself in man's consciousness of identity with the Absolute. Instead of the rather abrupt method of position, negation, and re-affirmation known as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, we have here the more fluid process of a spiral movement, departing from and returning to itself. And this was to be the very mainspring of the system that next comes up for consideration. HEGEL. {111} [Illustration: Hegel (_Copyright B. P. C._)]