This mutual alteration of cohesion by means of the contact of two different bodies is electricity; the cohesion-diminishing factor +E is the potency of hydrogen, -E is the potency of oxygen. “The totality of the dynamic process is represented only by the chemical process.” (20)“By the positing of the dynamic totality the addition of light, is directly posited as a product. The expression, the total product, therefore signifies light combined with the force of gravitation; by the positing of the relative totality of the whole potency, the force of gravity is directly reduced to the mere form of the Being of absolute identity.” This is the third potency (A3), the organism.(21)Schelling launched out into too many individual details, if he desired to indicate the construction of the whole universe. On the one hand, however, he did not complete this representation, and on the other hand, he has confined himself mainly to implicit existence, and has mixed therewith the formalism of external construction according to a presupposed scheme. In this representation he advanced only as far as the organism, and did not reach the presentation of the other side of knowledge, i.e. the philosophy of spirit. Schelling began time after time, in accordance with the idea implied in this construction, to work out the natural universe, and especially the organism. He banishes all such meaningless terms as perfection, wisdom, outward adaptability; or, in other words, the Kantian formula, that a thing appears so and so to our faculty of knowledge, is transformed by him into this other formula, that such and such is the constitution of Nature.
Following up Kant's meagre attempt at demonstrating spirit in nature, he devoted special attention to inaugurating anew this mode of regarding nature, so as to recognize in objective existence the same schematism, the same rhythm, as is present in the ideal. Hence nature represents itself therein not as something alien to spirit, but as being in its general aspect, a projection of spirit into an objective mode.
We have further to remark that Schelling by this theory became the originator of modern Natural Philosophy, since he was the first to exhibit Nature as the sensuous perception or the expression of the Notion and its determinations. Natural Philosophy is no new science; we met with it continually - in the works of Aristotle, for instance, and elsewhere. English Philosophy is also a mere apprehension in thought of the physical; forces, laws of Nature, are its fundamental determinations. The opposition of physics and Natural Philosophy is therefore not the opposition of the unthinking and the thinking view of Nature; Natural Philosophy means, if we take it in its whole extent, nothing else than the thoughtful contemplation of Nature; but this is the work of ordinary physics also, since its determinations of forces, laws, &c., are thoughts. The only difference is that in physics thoughts are formal thoughts of the understanding, whose material and content cannot, as regards their details, be determined by thought itself, but must be taken from experience. But concrete thought contains its determination and its content in itself, and merely the external mode of appearance pertains to the senses. If, then, Philosophy passes beyond the form of the understanding, and has apprehended the speculative Notion, it must alter the determinations of thought, the categories of the understanding regarding Nature. Kant was the first to set about this; and Schelling has sought to grasp the Notion of Nature, instead of contenting himself with the ordinary metaphysics of the same. Nature is to him nothing but the external mode of existence as regards the system of thought-forms, just as mind is the existence of the same system in the form of consciousness. That for which we have to thank Schelling, therefore, is not that he brought thought to bear on the comprehension of Nature, but that he altered the categories according to which thought applied itself to Nature; he introduced forms of Reason, and applied them - as he did the form of the syllogism in magnetism, for instance - in place of the ordinary categories of the understanding. He has not only shown these forms in Nature, but has also sought to evolve Nature out of a principle of this kind.
