r a system of _idealism_. The subjective nature of our
knowledge had been laid down; there was nothing left of the real world
but this _noumenon_ which had been ejected from the realm of space; he
acted, therefore, a consistent and charitable part, in taking this
forlorn and banished entity into the region, at least, of thought. All
the external world is now but a projection from the individual mind--the
_non-ego_ is but another development of the _ego_--the _object_ is
nothing but a sort of limitation or contrast which the subject throws
out, to make a life for itself; the web it spins in the blank
infinitude. Of the whole material world we have for ever got rid.

Here it might be supposed that speculation in this direction had reached
its extreme point; and as idealism is a system in which the mind cannot
long rest, contradicting, as it does, its ineradicable convictions, that
here would commence a philosophical revolution, and a return to a more
sober and accurate method of investigation. But the German mind has put
forth at this point an astonishing fertility. It has played with this
idealism, refined upon it, varied it, produced new phases of it;
reviving the strangest paradoxes of the Alexandrian school; and
teaching--in this, the nineteenth century--with the gravest confidence
in the world--with all the assurance of an ancient Scald chanting forth
his mythological fables, a whole system of idealistic cosmogony!

Schelling, in his idealism, in some measure reinstated the _object_; not
by reviving the vulgar notion of its reality, but declaring it to be in
its essence identical with the _subject_, and pronouncing both to have
an equally real or equally ideal existence. He thus got rid of the
embarrassment which encounters us in the ordinary systems of idealism,
of the subjective _Ego_ producing the objective _Ego_. _Thought_ and
_thing_ are identical. But this identity is to be recognised only in the
mind of God, in the absolute--which develops what in itself is unity in
the form of a duality. As if (to use a rude illustration) the same image
should be shot from the interior of a magic lantern through two
diverging tubes, making that twofold which was itself identical.

As it is hard for common apprehension to conceive this _absolute_, and
seize upon this identity of thought and thing, Schelling invented a
faculty of mind expressly for the comprehension of such profound
doctrines of philosophy. He called it _intel