Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where, besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly of the springs of thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes and the fears of the struggle republican France waged against the German powers, and had seen that Kantian criticism contained within it a fire which would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology. Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed through his college career in a very creditable but by no means brilliant way. Among his fellows he had gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior, breathed a deep impassioned zeal for that higher life of which the nobler spirits among the young then, as now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling, singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art, and the receptivity of genius to catch and string together the theories that rose to the top in science and letters, had already made his mark as a philosophic writer, while his senior compatriot, leading the inconspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up and widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in metaphysics trod the same lines as Fichte; but in 1797 (when he was aged 22) appeared his _Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature._ A year later he was lecturing at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and with Fichte, who, however, soon quitted the place. In 1800 appeared the _System of Transcendental Idealism_, and in 1801 the _Exposition of my System_; followed in 1802 by _Bruno_, and in 1803 by the _Lectures on University Studies._ Brief periods of academic teaching at Würzburg, Erlangen, and Munich, and after 1841 at Berlin, broke the silence which set in after his _Inquiries into the nature of human liberty_ in 1809; but little certain was known to the outside public of the final standpoint till the publication of his collected works (1856-61).