In a short space of time Schelling produced three works:
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft, 1797 (
Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science);
Von der Weltseele, 1798 (
On the World Soul); and
Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799 (
First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature). As criticism of scientific procedure, these writings retain a relevance. Historically, according to Richards: Despite the tentativeness of their titles, these monographs introduced radical interpretations of nature that would reverberate through the sciences, and particularly the biology, of the next century. They developed the fundamental doctrines of
Naturphilosophie. In
System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800 (
System of Transcendental Idealism), Schelling included ideas on matter and the organic in Part III. They form just part of a more ambitious work that takes up other themes, in particular aesthetics. From this point onwards
Naturphilosophie was less of a research concern for him, as he reformulated his philosophy. However, it remained an influential aspect of his teaching. For a short while, he edited a journal, the
Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik (bound volume 1802). Schelling's
Naturphilosophie was a way in which he worked himself out of the tutelage of Fichte, with whom he quarrelled decisively towards the end of the 1790s. More than that, however, it brought him within the orbit of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, both intellectually and (as a direct consequence of Goethe's sympathetic attitude) by a relocation; and it broke with basic
Kantian tenets.
Iain Hamilton Grant writes: Schelling's postkantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the
Copernican revolution [...] Schelling held that the divisions imposed on nature, by our ordinary perception and thought, do not have absolute validity. They should be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative energy which is the soul or inner aspect of nature. In other words he was a proponent of a variety of
organicism. The dynamic series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces; light, with its subordinate processes (magnetism, electricity, and chemical action); organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility. The continual change presented to us by
experience, taken together with the thought of unity in productive force of nature, leads to the conception of the
duality through which nature expresses itself in its varied products. Fichte's system, called the
Wissenschaftslehre, had begun with a fundamental distinction between dogmatism (fatalistic) and criticism (free), as his formulation of idealism. Beiser divides up the mature form of Schelling's
Naturphilosophie into the attitudes of: •
transcendental realism: the thesis that "nature exists independent of all consciousness, even that of the transcendental subject" (in Kantian terminology—
Critique of Pure Reason—the
transcendental subject is the
condition of possibility of experience), and •
transcendental naturalism: the thesis that "everything is explicable according to the laws of nature, including the rationality of the transcendental subject". Beiser notes how
Naturphilosophie was first a counterbalance to
Wissenschaftslehre, and then in Schelling's approach became the senior partner. After that, it was hardly to be avoided that Schelling would become an opponent of Fichte, having been a close follower in the early 1790s. We are able to apprehend and represent nature to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, since it is the same spirit of which we become aware in self-consciousness, though here unconsciously. The variety of its forms is not imposed on it externally, since there is no external
teleology in nature. Nature is a self-forming whole, within which only natural explanations can be sought. The function of
Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal. ==Influence and critics of
Naturphilosophie==