It is the instinct of each new generation to vindicate its freedom by rebelling against the authority of its predecessors; and when a new idea begins to influence human thought, it usually, on its first appearance, shows that side which is most antagonistic to the spirit of the past. Thus the peculiar nineteenth-century movement begins with a reassertion of the _universal_ as against the _individual_, which is so emphatic that it looks like a return to Spinozism. Schelling is the most prominent philosophical representative of this tendency. In the works which he wrote about the beginning of the century, he broke away even from the universalized individualism of Fichte, and gave emphatic prominence to the great philosophical commonplace—which had been almost forgotten by the previous age—that there is an identity which is below or above all distinction, and that the universe is one through all its multiplicity, and permanent through all its changes. His maxim—that there are none but _quantitative_ differences in things, and that all these, even the difference of mind and matter, disappear in the “indifference” of the Absolute—was like a declaration of war against the “enlightenment.” It meant that philosophy was no longer content to regard the whole as the sum of the parts, but could look upon the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of the whole. With Schelling, indeed, this differentiation was in danger of being reduced to a mere appearance and the unity of the Absolute was on the point of vanishing in a bare or abstract identity. But his strong assertion of the unity beneath all difference, of the priority of the universal to all particulars, was perhaps necessary, ere the true conception of the organic unity of the world could be arrived at. And the correction soon came with Hegel, who maintained that the absolute is “not substance, but subject.” For this meant that the absolute is a self-differentiating principle, realizing itself in a world of difference which is no mere appearance, but its own essential manifestation; and again—what is the counterpart or complementary truth to this—that in the world there are “degrees of reality,” and that “mind is higher in degree than nature.” But these ideas could hardly have been understood until the uncompromising assertion of the absolute unity had been made, and until the subjectivity of the Kantian and Fichtean points of view had once for all been set aside.