SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON German philosopher, was born on Jan. 27, at Leonberg, a small town of Wurttemberg. He was educated at the cloister school of Bebenhausen, near Tubingen, where his father, an able Orientalist, was chaplain and professor, and en tered the theological seminary at Tubingen at 16. Among his (elder) contemporaries were Hegel and Holderlin. He shared in the revolutionary sentiments common among his fellow-students, and was suspected of being the author of a German version of the Marseillaise. In 1792 he graduated. Meanwhile he was a close student of Kant, Fichte and Spinoza, more especially of Fichte. Schelling had no sooner grasped the leading ideas of Fichte's amended form of the critical philosophy than he put together his impressions of it in his 'Ober die Moglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie fiberhaupt (I794)• The more elaborate work, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, oder fiber das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795), while remaining within the limits of the Fichtean idealism, exhibits a tendency to give the Fichtean method a more objective application and to amalgamate with it Spinoza's more realistic view.
After two years as tutor to two youths of noble family, Schelling was called as extraordinary professor of philosophy to Jena, the centre of the poets and philosophers of the Romantic School, in midsummer 1798. He had already contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Fichte and Niethammer ; had written the Briefe fiber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (1796), a critique of the ulti mate issues of the Kantian system, and Neue Deduction des Na turrechts (1797), which to some extent anticipated Fichte's treat ment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts. His studies of physical science bore rapid fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (1798). The philo sophical renown of Jena was at its height during the years ( 1798– 1803) of Schelling's residence. His intellectual sympathies united him closely with some of the most active literary tendencies of the time. With Goethe he was on excellent terms, but he was re pelled by Schiller's less expansive disposition. In Schelling, es sentially a self-conscious genius, eager and rash, yet with unde viable power, the Romanticists hailed a personality of the true Romantic type. With August Wilhelm Schlegel and his wife Caroline, herself the embodiment of the Romantic spirit, Schel ling's relations were intimate, and a marriage between Schelling and Caroline's young daughter, Auguste Bohmer, was vaguely contemplated by both. Auguste's death in 1800 (due partly to Schelling's rash confidence in his medical knowledge) drew Schel ling and Caroline together, and Schlegel having removed to Berlin, a divorce was, apparently with his consent, arranged. On June 2, 1803, Schelling and Caroline were married, and with the marriage Schelling's life at Jena came to an end.
From 1803 to 1806 Schelling was professor at the new university of Wiiriburg. During this time he broke both with Fichte and Hegel. He embroiled himself with his colleagues and also with the
Government. In Munich, to which he removed in 1806, he found a quiet residence. A position as State official, at first as associate of the academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical section of the academy of sciences, gave him ease and leisure. Without resigning his offi cial position he lectured for a short time at Stuttgart, and during seven years at Erlangen (1820-27). In 2809 Caroline died, and three years later Schelling married one of her closest friends, Pauline Cotter, in whom he found a faithful companion.
During the long stay at Munich (1806-41) Schelling's literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The "Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie" contained in the Jahrbucher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806-08) are for the most part extracts from the Wiirzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den gottlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn forth by the special incident of Jacobi's work. The only writing of significance is the "Philosophische Untersuchungen fiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit," which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften, vol. i. (2809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to mysti cism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophie und Religion. In 1815 appeared the tract fiber die Gottheiten zu Samothrake, ostensibly a portion of a great work, Die Weltalter, frequently an nounced as ready for publication, of which no great part was ever written. The dominance of Hegel in the German schools appears to have silenced Schelling. It was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a preface to a translation by H. Beckers of a work by Cousin, he expressed in writing the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian and to his own earlier conceptions of phi losophy. The antagonism certainly was not new; it was evidenced in the Erlangen lectures on the history of philosophy (Saint. x. 124-125) of 1822, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true positive complement to the negative of logical or specu lative philosophy. The writings of Strauss, Feuerbach and other members of the Hegelian Left had alarmed the religious element. Frederick William IV. invited him to Berlin in 1841, and made him Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, in the hope that he would lecture at the university and counteract the Hegelians. But these were too strongly entrenched. In 1845 he ceased to lecture. No authentic information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death (at Bad Ragaz, on Aug. 20, 1854), when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures: vol. i. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii. Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv. Philosophy of Revelation (1858).