It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins his first characteristic work,--the _Ideas towards a philosophy of Nature._ In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which all separate existence, body or mind, is only a _modus_, it is taken by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being. Every monad--and the human soul is the typical monad--is at once finite and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But--whether as underlying substance, or as unity of reality--both hold the cardinal doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity and unification--the identity--of what outside it appears as two sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise, therefore--or to see things in the absolute--is (not as Hegel's malicious joke puts it[3], to look at them 'in the night when all cows are dark,'--but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from the identity of the _Spirit_ within us with the _Nature_ without us. Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis) of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed absolute thesis,--an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity, or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The '_I_' is opposed to the _'Thee,'_ and the '_Them,_' and the 'It.' The 'thing'--or non-ego--is depreciated as compared with the thinker and willer. It is postulated _ad majorem gloriam_ of the Ego: in order that I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to make out of it. It _is_ nothing but what it _will be_--or will be if I do what I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The Absolute is not yet:--it is only the forecast of a postulated result.