'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism, then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature and Spirit. Nature--not Matter--is the one side: Mind or Spirit the other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy--a philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work. But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.[4] [Footnote 1: He held posts of large general superintendence over church and school affairs at Weimar.] [Footnote 2: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.] [Footnote 3: Hegel, _Werke_, ii. 13.] [Footnote 4: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.] CHAPTER XIII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM. What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,' says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in which it appears immersed,--to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty, and to set it in free process of evolution: it means, in other words, to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view which sees in Nature only occurrences, or at the best sees the action _as a fact, not the action itself_ in the action[1].' There is in short a process in nature parallel in character to what Fichte had exhibited for consciousness. The natural world is no longer subordinated, but to appearance co-ordinate: and evolution or development, exhibited under the logical title of a 'deduction,' is the common law of both. The real order and the ideal order of the world are equally the work of an infinite and unconditioned activity, 'which never quite exhausts itself in any finite product, and of which everything individual is only as it were a particular expression.' The nature which we see broken up in groups and masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as a series of steps in a process of development: the steps in a single continuous product which has been arrested at several stages,--which presents distinct epochs, but nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to a single original ideal.