'To the philosopher,' Schelling concludes, 'Art is supreme, because it as it were opens to him the Holy of Holies, where in everlasting and original unity there burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted asunder in nature and history, and what in life and conduct, no less than in thinking, must for ever flee apart. The view the philosopher artificially makes for himself of nature is for Art the original and natural. What we call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange and secret characters. Yet could the riddle be disclosed, we should recognise in it the Odyssey of the mind, which, strangely deceived, in seeking itself, flees from itself: for through the sense-world there is a glimpse, only as through words of the meaning, only as through half-transparent mist of the land %of imagination, after which we yearn. That splendid picture emerges, as it were, by the removal of the invisible partition-wall which sunders the actual and the ideal world, and is only the opening by which those figures and regions of the world of imagination, that but imperfectly glimmer through the actual, come forward in all their fulness. Nature is to the artist no more than it is to the philosopher, viz. the ideal world as it appears under constant limitations, or only the imperfect reflex of a world which does not exist outside him, but within him.' 'If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making objective and universally accepted what the philosopher can only exhibit subjectively, it may also be expected that philosophy, as it was in the infancy of science born and nourished by poetry, and with it all those sciences which were by it carried on towards perfection, will after their completion flow back as so many single streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they issued. Nor is it in general hard to say what will be the means for the return of science to poetry: for such a means has existed in mythology before this, as it now seems, irrevocable separation took place. But as to how a new mythology,--which cannot be the invention of the single poet, but of a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet,--can itself arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be expected only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of history[16].' [Footnote 1: Schelling, _Werke_, iii. 13. (References always to the first series.)] [Footnote 2: Schelling, _Werke,_ ii. 409.] [Footnote 3: Schelling, _Werke_, ii. 500.] [Footnote 4: Ibid. ii. 350.] [Footnote 5: Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.] [Footnote 6: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.] [Footnote 7: 'Every inquiry into the influence of general nature on living beings,' says Treviranus, 'must start from the principle that all living forms are products of physical influences which still go on at the present time and are altered only in degree and direction.'] [Footnote 8: Schelling, _Werke_, iii. 63.] [Footnote 9: Hegel, _Encyclopaedie,_ § 249.]