THE “HIGHEST relation of Art and Nature,” writes Schelling, “is shown in this, that Art makes Nature the medium of manifesting the soul it contains.” This strongly suggests, if it does not define, the central thought of the philosophical system he attempted to elaborate, progressively, in a series of works which when collected (1856–61) make fourteen volumes. It is the idea that nature and spirit are both realities, each distinct, but that both are the correlated parts of a whole which cannot exist in its completeness without both. Spirit is not considered in this system as distinct from, but rather as the inspiration of. Nature—as its “reason for existence” (ratio essendi). “Art” becomes thus the mode by which the human mind expresses the correlated harmony of the mind in nature. The thought thus developed by the philosophy of Schelling will do much to make intelligible the view of art which inspired Ruskin and his school in England.

  Schelling was born in Würtemberg, January 27th, 1775. Receiving his own university education at Tübingen, he became a Professor at Jena (1798) and later at Würzberg, Munich, and Berlin. His university associations brought him into close relations with Hegel and the Schlegels, by whom he was influenced as he was, perhaps to a greater extent, by Fichte. Among his more notable works are “First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature,” “Transcendental Idealism,” “Exposition of My System of Philosophy,” “Philosophy and Religion,” and “Human Freedom.” He died in Switzerland, August 20th, 1854.