conscience, was afterwards laid open to all men in
the "Metaphysic of Ethics?" As little will you allow your philosophical
need to be satisfied with any thing you can get from SCHELLING; for
however well it sounds to "throw yourself from the transcendental
emptiness of ideal reason into the warm embrace of living and luxuriant
nature," here also you will find yourself haunted by the intellectual
phantom of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or in its best
phasis a "pantheizing deification of nature." Strange enough as it may
seem, the true philosophy is to be found any where rather than among
philosophers. Each philosopher builds up a reasoned system of a part of
existence; but life is based upon God-given instincts and emotions, with
which reason has nothing to do; and nature contains many things which it
is not given to mortal brain to comprehend, much less to systematize. True
philosophy is not to be found in any intellectual system, much less in any
of the Aristotelian quality, where the emotional element in man is
excluded or subordinated; but in a living experience. To know philosophy,
therefore, first know life. To learn to philosophize, learn to live; and
live not partially, but with the full outspread vitality of human reason.
You go to college, and, as if you were made altogether of head, expect
some Peter Abelard forthwith, by academic disputation, to _reason_ you
into manhood; but neither manhood nor any vital WHOLE ever was learned by
reasoning. Pray, therefore, to the Author of all good, in the first place,
that you may _be_ something rather than that you may _know_ something. Get
yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life,
which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that
same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of
void brought fulness, and out of chaos a world.

[Footnote E: This is Menzel's phrase, not Schlegel's. "Hegel's _centrum war
ein blos denkendes, auf oeder Heide spekulirendes, kleines, suffisantes,
selbstgenuegsames Ichlein_." The untranslatable beauty of the German is in
the diminutive with which the sentence closes. It is difficult to say
whether Menzel or Schlegel shows the greater hostility to the poor Berlin
philosopher.]

Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the main scope, popularly
stated, of Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his two
first lectures on the philosophy of life