Metaphysics

Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature

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Friedrich Schelling

1797

Written when Schelling was twenty-two, this pioneering work of Naturphilosophie argues that nature is not dead mechanism but a living, self-organising whole in which the same polar forces that drive magnetism, electricity, and chemical affinity are the unconscious expression of spirit striving toward self-awareness. Drawing on the latest natural science of his day — Kant's dynamical physics, Galvani's electrical experiments, the new chemistry of Lavoisier — Schelling reinterprets the whole of nature as a graduated series of potencies leading from brute matter up through organic life to the self-consciousness of the human mind. It was a transformative influence on the Romantic Naturphilosophen and on nineteenth-century German biology.