But the 'productive intuition' is, as Kant would say, blind: it is unconscious in its operation: and it is only after an arrest, a Sabbath when it surveys and judges its work, that it begins to realise itself through a process of analysis and reflection which elicits and fixes the categories that have been operative in it. By this abstraction intelligence rises out of mere production to intelligent and conscious production, i.e. to volition, where it has an ideal and realises it. With volition and voluntary action, objectivity is to appearance further certified and fortified. It is as active, i. e. as free, and even moral, agents, that we set forward categorically the reality of the world. So, too, Fichte had declared. But, as Schelling reminds us, with this intensified assertion of a law and an ideal to which the real must and shall correspond,--with the declaration that the realm of absolute consistency and ideal truth of reason is the true and real for ever and ever--we come across the fundamental antithesis of the 'Is' and the 'Ought,5 of the objective and subjective, of unconscious necessity and self-conscious freedom. With an attempt to get a philosophy of history,--i. e. of man and mind as the culminating truth of things, we see ourselves confronted with the opposition of fatalism and chance. On one hand history is only possible for beings who have an ideal in view,--one persistent aim and principle which their work and will is the means of realising. And yet it is an ideal which only the series of generations, only the whole race, can realise. Man's license to do or to refrain rests upon a larger, latent, divine necessity which constrains it. What human agents by their free choice determine and carry out, is carried out, in the long run, by the force of an everlasting and unchanging order, to which their wills seem but a mere plaything. But that man's free agency should thus harmonise with the constrained uniformities of nature is only possible on the assumption that both are phenomena of a common ground, or basis of identity, of an 'absolute identity, in which there is no duplication, and which for that reason, because the condition of all consciousness is duplication, can never reach consciousness. This ever-Unconscious, which, as it were the everlasting Sun in the spirit-kingdom, is hidden in its own undimmed light, and which, though it is never an object, still impresses its identity on all free objects, is simultaneously the same for all intelligences, the invisible "root" of which all intelligences are only the "powers," and the everlasting mediator between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or percipient,--simultaneously the ground of the uniformity in freedom, and of the freedom in uniformity of the objective[14].' To rise to the sense of this Absolute Identity, as common basis of harmony between the 'Ought' and the 'Is,' is to recognise Providence: it is Religion.