Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE GILES WHITELEY

Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Giles Whiteley

Schelling’s Reception in NineteenthCentury British Literature

Giles Whiteley Stockholm, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-319-95905-4 ISBN 978-3-319-95906-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948172 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), German philosoper, 1854. © iStock/Getty Images Plus This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book has been a long time in the writing, first conceived around 2013. It would never have been possible to have developed the project without the support and encouragement of Elinor Shaffer, who invited me to give a paper on the topic of Schelling’s British Reception at the School of Advanced Study in London in 2014. Her enthusiasm gave me impetus to continue my work and faith that the book represented a contribution to knowledge worth pursuing. To those who listened to that paper, or to other papers on the topic delivered at Stockholm and elsewhere, I thank them for their insightful comments. Particular thanks are owed to scholars with whom I’ve discussed different aspects of this book: Jeremy Adler, Bo Ekelund, Stefano Evangelista, Gül Bilge Han, Stefan Helgesson, Richard Hibbitt, Malcolm Hicks, Maike Oergel, Irina Rasmussen, Jeremy Tambling and others. A debt is also owed to my students, who have had the debatable pleasure of suffering through my meditations on Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and other works: this book is as much a product of trying to teach this material as the time it has taken to research it. Thanks to the various librarians in archives and special collections I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know, and in particular those at the Wren Library, Cambridge, the Bodleian Library and the Balliol Archives, Oxford, and the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, as well as those of Kungliga Biblioteket and the University Library in Stockholm. My thanks to The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, v

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the University of Manchester Library, and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to quote from unpublished manuscript materials. Part of Chapter 10 has previously appeared as ‘Pater’s Conclusion: A New Source’, Notes and Queries, 64:1 (2017): 128–30. I thank Oxford University Press for permission to reuse this material. At Palgrave Macmillan, I would like to thank my editor, Brendan George, who has been enthusiastic from the outset, Ben Doyle, Carmel Kennedy and April James, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers who provided important responses which have helped the book improve. Needless to say, any remaining errors are my own. A final word of thanks to my family, Cecilia, Sam and Elias, whose patience during the final few months has been remarkable. Stockholm, Sweden

Giles Whiteley

Contents

1

Uncanny Echoes 1

2

Schelling’s Reception in British Romanticism, 1794–1819 33

3

Schelling’s Reception in Scotland, 1817–1833 63

4

The Plagiarism Controversy 99

5

Schelling in Berlin 119

6

The Victorian Literary Reception of Schelling 139

7

Schelling and British Theology 177

8

The Legacies of Naturphilosophie and British Science 207

9

Schelling and the British Universities 237

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10 Schelling in British Mythological and Aesthetic Literature 257 11 Towards a Modern Reading of Schelling 289 Index 303

A Note on Translations

I render quotations from foreign languages in English. For citations to Schelling’s work, I give references to the German in the Sämmtliche Werke (SW), edited by Karl Friedrich August Schelling, and wherever possible to the ongoing Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe (HKA), under the general editorship of Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Jörg Jantzen and Hermann Krings. I also give references to English translations wherever available. I take the liberty of silently modifying the wording where appropriate for the sake of either consistency or nuance. Where no English edition is available, translations are my own.

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CHAPTER 1

Uncanny Echoes

Many Anglophone readers will first encounter the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) in the work of another German writer, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In the opening pages of his essay on ‘Das Unheimliche’ [The ‘Uncanny’] (1919), Freud quotes Daniel Sanders (1819–1897) quoting Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie (1842), in an effort to define the concept of the ‘uncanny’: ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (GW 12: 234; SE 17: 224). This partial and edited quotation, taken out of context from Schelling’s lectures, turns into the leitmotif in Freud’s essay for the return of the repressed.1 It offers an opportune point at which to begin thinking about Schelling’s reception in nineteenth-century British literature, in which the name of Schelling is also a kind of uncanny presence. The situation of this passage is taken doubly out of context, first by Sanders and then by Freud. Schelling is dealing with the Homeric hymns, which he figures as the moment of the emergence of ‘civilised’ life out of the realm of myth: That clear sky which hovers above the Homeric poems, that ether which arches over Homer’s world, could not have covered Greece until the dark and darkening force of that uncanny principle that dominated earlier religions had been reduced to the Mysteries (all things are called uncanny which should have remained secret, hidden and latent, but which have come to light). (SW II.2, 649; translation Vidler 1992: 26–27) © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_1

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We recognise here two currents of Victorian classicism, originally borrowed from German hermeneutic traditions: on the one hand, the idea that the Homeric age, or more generally the Greek civilisation this stands for, augurs ‘civilisation’, as it does for a William Ewart Gladstone (1809– 1898) or Matthew Arnold (1822–1888); and on the other, in this ‘dark and darkening force’, the chthonian classicism of a Walter Pater (1839– 1894). In this later sense, Schelling suggests that civilisation is undercut by what it represses in order to found itself as such. The foundation is the ground—das Grund—but the uncanny posited here by Schelling is the unground—das Ungrund; this concept lies at the origin and limit of Schelling’s attempt to reply to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831), and to rethink his own earlier philosophy from the Freiheitsschrift (1809) onwards. Freud’s brief citation offers both a model and a metaphor for Schelling’s British reception. The model is of the partial encounter, itself deferred, which encompasses not only our own engagements with Schelling, but also many of the encounters during the nineteenth century. While he was widely read by a number of influential thinkers during the period, Schelling was less frequently named openly in published British literature from the 1830s onwards. As a consequence, we find that Schelling’s influence is often discerned diffusely. The model therefore also gives us a metaphor: the name ‘Schelling’ is itself unheimlich, since what is deferred (the open and direct statement of ‘obligations’ or influence) is a presence eluding presence, so that the explicit situation of later nineteenth century thought in relation to Schelling as its precursor is displaced. This book will show the way in which the name of Schelling reverberates throughout the nineteenth century, discovered in unhomely and occasionally untimely situations, and often displaced onto other more familiar figures. As such, this book is about not only the reception of Schelling, but the sense in which such a reception is often heard as a kind of uncanny echo.

Uncanny Coincidences: Reading Coleridge Reading Schelling This book proposes do for Schelling what René Wellek (1903–1995) did for Kant: establish a central place in the history of nineteenthcentury British intellectual life. While the importance of the role played

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by Schelling in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) intellectual development has long been acknowledged, no book has yet examined Schelling’s reception throughout the period of the nineteenth century. But in order to speak about Schelling’s British reception, it is important, from the outset, to understand the privileged place of Coleridge, and specifically his Biographia Literaria (1817), in this narrative.2 In this next section, I plan to read the passages of the Biographia in which he discusses Schelling slowly and patiently, in order to follow closely the rhetorical moves through which Coleridge sought to position himself in relation to his German precursor. It was in the Biographia Literaria that Coleridge made clear the intellectual ‘obligations’ he owed, or felt he owed, towards Schelling. It was a move that served to promote the name of Schelling to the attention of a wider British public. Although the Biographia did not, in fact, mark Schelling’s first naming in British literature, and while Coleridge was not, chronologically speaking, the first British writer to feel his influence (as we shall see in Chapter 2), the text nevertheless remains an essential starting point for thinking through Schelling’s reception in nineteenthcentury British literature. It is so for two reasons: firstly, owing to Coleridge’s immense importance as a ‘transmitter’ of Schelling’s ideas; secondly, owing to the later notoriety of Schelling’s misuse in the text itself. This latter point refers to the text’s afterlife: in 1834, a few months after Coleridge’s death, Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) published an essay outing Coleridge’s extensive ‘borrowing’ from Schelling: ‘This was a barefaced plagiarism, which could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and especially of that section of German literature’ (2003: 292). The ensuing controversy (dealt with in Chapter 4) would lend to the name of Schelling a notoriety that in some way came to frame many of the subsequent British engagements across the century. Thus, Coleridge’s text may be characterised as the Urszene, the primal scene for thinking through Schelling’s British reception; it was primal, both in the sense that it became originary for much of the British literary imaginary that followed, and in the sense of it being a scene of repression. From this point onwards, Schelling necessarily comes to figure as an uncanny presence. The name ‘Schelling’ first enters in Chapter 9 of the Biographia, which describes Coleridge’s influences from the German idealist tradition. Naming Schelling, Coleridge remarks that when reading his

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texts for the first time he discovered a ‘genial coincidence’ of their thoughts (1984: 1: 160). But in point of fact, at this, the moment of his first naming, Schelling is already uncanny, a figure of return. Six paragraphs earlier, he had appeared in the text, as ‘a contemporary writer of the Continent’ (1984: 1: 147). Moreover, in point of fact, even this unnamed figure was a revenant, since he had been introduced even before this in the headnote to Chapter 9, announcing that what followed would deal with Coleridge’s ‘obligations to Schelling’ (1984: 1: 140). The headnote, a kind of parergonal supplement to the text, not only assists the reader in navigating the body of the argument, but prefaces it, directing the reader towards a ‘proper’ reading of the text. In this sense, Schelling’s introduction in the body of the text as ‘a contemporary writer of the Continent’ is all the more remarkable: such a nomination is virtual anonymity given the plethora of names it could refer to, and so the fact that Coleridge refuses Schelling’s name is to some degree a refusal, perhaps even a kind of wilful denial, a Verneinung [negation] of the ‘obligation’ owed. This ‘obligation’, a ‘binding’ (OED, ‘obligation’, n.), is a question of debt, originating from legal lexicon (from Latin ligāre). And all of this must also be contextualised alongside the fact that while the headnote constitutes Schelling’s first naming, it does not constitute his first appearance in the text; approximately forty percent of the preceding chapter, in which Schelling himself does not appear as such, was an unacknowledged translation from his System des transcendentalen Idealismus [System of Transcendental Idealism] (1800). Three spectres of Schelling before we arrive at Schelling himself. Let us proceed, however, with the penultimate penumbra, and Coleridge’s introduction of the ‘contemporary writer of the Continent’. The context of this reference, which occurs towards the end of a paragraph, is a discussion of the influence of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) on Coleridge. ‘While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent’, he begins, and the subordinate clause qualifies what follows: Coleridge ‘in part’—in some degree or measure, as yet unspecified—‘translates’ the ‘contemporary writer of the Continent’. Given this phrasing, it seems strange that he chooses not to name Schelling here, since he is already acknowledging that the words are, at least ‘in part’, not his: why does Coleridge not name Schelling here, give him his dues? Given the context, we are perhaps able to make comparison to the laudatory introduction of Böhme at the beginning of the paragraph: ‘Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be

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ashamed of the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behmen?’ (1984: 1: 146). At the start of this paragraph, Coleridge refuses to be afraid of naming his sources, but by the end of it he refuses acknowledgment. Coleridge’s term ‘fear’ takes on significance: it seems a kind of displacement [Verschiebung] and we may think of it alongside what Freud says of anxiety [Angst].3 With respect to Böhme, there are associations with pantheism and thereby atheism, and Coleridge and his readers must have had the Pantheismusstreit, the pantheism controversy still fresh in their minds.4 But displaced metonymically from the beginning to the end of the paragraph, we may ask why Coleridge is afraid of naming Schelling. Regardless, to evade the name, to speak of Schelling as merely a ‘contemporary writer of the Continent’, seems tantamount to reneging upon the terms of the announced ‘obligation’ in the headnote. In speaking of ‘a contemporary writer of the Continent’, Coleridge seems to be doing everything he can to keep the spectre of Schelling from coming to light. Indeed, all of this occurs in what is subordinate to the main clause: not only is Schelling not named as such, but he is subordinated in the very syntax of the sentence. Doubly relegated, then. Instead, the main clause addresses the reader directly: While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another’s words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible. (1984: 1: 147)

‘Let me be permitted to premise’, Coleridge begins, asking the reader to engage with Schelling’s words as though they were Coleridge’s, claiming priority of thought; that Schelling should have achieved priority of publication is simply ‘coincidence’. Coleridge ‘might have transcribed’ Schelling’s ideas from his notes, ‘written many years before’. ‘Transcribed’ is another term with legal resonance (referring to the exchange of property in Roman law), but here it figures a ghosting of one text by the other: the experience described is unheimlich, since what is most familiar (one’s own thoughts) are read in the manuscript of the other, as though displaced telepathically (GW 12: 245; SE 17: 234). Coleridge’s ‘translation’ of Schelling is ‘partly’ a ‘tribute’, but a tribute

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left un-attributed, precisely since Schelling remains unnamed. Again, the lexicon of legal discourse: the ‘tribute’ from Latin tribūtum, is, on the one hand, ‘an offering or gift rendered as a duty’, and on the other, ‘something paid […] by a subordinate to a superior’ (OED, ‘tribute’, n.). The ‘tribute’, then, is also necessarily a question of a priority, here not simply temporal but also in terms of intellectual rank. Perhaps thinking of this, Coleridge will later deny suspicions that he might ‘wish to enter into a rivalry with SCHELLING’ (1984: 1: 162), and while Harold Bloom thinks Coleridge’s anxiety of influence directed primarily towards the ‘strong’ poetical precursors of John Milton (1608–1674) and, more pertinently, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), the rivalry with whom occasioned the writing of the Biographia Literaria, these pages manifest Coleridge’s anxiety over the influence of Schelling.5 Coleridge’s disclaimer regarding priority of thought is common to Schelling’s real entrance into the text six paragraphs on, which constitutes the true reckoning of those ‘Obligations to Schelling’ announced in the headnote. Coleridge’s language here in the Biographia Literaria, his literary life and hence a kind of autobiography, suggestively foreshadows Freud, who in his own Selbstdarstellung [Autobiography] (1925), speaks of the unheimlich presence of philosophy in psychoanalysis: The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides [Übereinstimmungen] with the philosophy of Schopenhauer […] is not to be traced to my acquaintance [Bekanntschaft] with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late [spät] in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions [Ahnungen und Einsichten] often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings [mühsamen Ergebnissen] of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided [gemieden] by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority [Priorität] than with keeping my mind unembarrassed. (GW 14: 86; SE 20: 59–60)

We note two key terms here repeated from Coleridge’s discussion of his obligations to Schelling: the question of ‘coincidence’ [Übereinstimmungen] and ‘priority’ [Priorität]. Freud would term this ‘Vermeidung’ [evasion]: ‘I have carefully avoided [vermeiden] any contact with philosophy proper’ (GW 14: 84; SE 20: 59), he comments, and we find in both Coleridge and Freud the same confluence of terms: coincidence, priority, evasion, obligation and debt.

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In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge begins the reckoning of debt as follows: ‘In Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie, and the System des transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do’ (1984: 1: 160). The phrasing is arresting: it mimes laudation, but with irony. Coleridge makes clear that he had already ‘toiled out’ the ground for himself, thus the acknowledgment of an ‘obligation’ simultaneously establishes distance. Again, the syntax rewards close analysis: the subordinate clause creates a syntactic hierarchy, with the coordinating conjunction not simply equivalent but directional, marked as such by the preceding comma. What is given ‘priority’ is the ‘coincidence’ between Schelling’s thought and that which Coleridge had ‘toiled out’ for himself; what is relegated in significance by the subordinate clause is that sense in which reading these texts was productive, generative, a spur to Coleridge’s future creativity. Coleridge’s strategy is exactly the same as Freud’s will be: Coleridge has ‘toiled out’ the terrain, just as Freud contrasts his ‘laborious findings’ with the ‘intuitions’ of Nietzsche. It is as though Coleridge is also seeking to keep his mind ‘unembarrassed’. Schelling is introduced in an independent paragraph built from a single sentence. Immediately, at the beginning of the new paragraph, a proviso, an accounting. ‘I have introduced this statement’, Coleridge begins, ‘as appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have announced in a preceding page’ (1984: 1: 161). The statement is made here only to be put on hold, placed in reserve, until a later work, which will presumably account for the ‘coincidence’ more fully, the ‘Logosophia’, Coleridge’s unfinished Magnum Opus. ‘It would be a mere act of justice to myself’, Coleridge continues, ‘were I to warn my future readers, that an identity of thought, or even a similarity of phrase will not be at all times certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling’ (1984: 1: 163). Again, the legal lexicon: he is offering a proleptic ‘self-defence against the charge of plagiarism’ as yet not levelled against him and warns that ‘proof’ will be required, ‘certain proof’; he seeks to place a substantial burden upon the prosecution. ‘All the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German philosopher’, Coleridge claims. He is describing a scene of reading, where what is read is what he had already thought, the text of the other tracing his own thoughts: an unheimlich experience.

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The question is, how to account for the coincidence? Coleridge deems this a moot point. The coincidence is ‘not at all to be wondered at’, he tells us, attempting to explain it away by recourse to spatial and temporal ‘coincidences’, so that the one coincidence (spatiotemporal) explains the other (chance): We had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had equal obligations to […] Bruno; and Schelling has lately […] avowed that same affectionate reference for the labours of Behmen […] which I had formed at a much earlier period. (1984: 1: 161)

The lexicon of debt and coincidence is linked now to the regression to the past as the site of the determination of the subject’s mental life, and as such might be related to those ‘coincidences’ that according to Freud are experienced as ‘involuntary repetition [unbeabsichtigte Wiederkehr]’ (GW 12: 248; SE, 17: 237). Not only should the coincidences not be wondered at, they could not have been helped, Coleridge argues. He appeals to a kind of confluence of influence, a Zeitgeist precipitated in Jena, and a mutual debt to Böhme, whose ‘labours’ must be given their due, just as Coleridge must be given credit for ‘toiling out’ the terrain later encountered in Schelling. Böhme therefore returns here, at the key moment when Coleridge is engaging with the depth of his ‘obligations’ to Schelling: it was in the context of acknowledging his own debt to Böhme, to recall, that Schelling had first entered the text proper (1984: 1: 147). Now we find that Schelling’s own acknowledgement of his debt to Böhme has arrived only ‘lately’: it is a bathetic attribution.6 ‘Bathetic’ would be another translation of Freud’s ‘spät’, his reading of philosophy coming-too-late. Coleridge continues: The coincidence of SCHELLING’S system with certain general ideas of Behmen, he declares to be mere coincidence; while my obligations have been more direct. He needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude. (1984: 1: 161)

At this moment, then, when acknowledging his obligations to Schelling, Coleridge’s tactic is diversion, a kind of Freudian Vermeidung. Instead of addressing his obligation to Schelling, his remarkable tactic is instead to evaluate Schelling’s own obligations in order to see if they account for

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all of his debts. Citing Schelling’s own anxiety of influence in attempting to dispel his own, Coleridge seems to assert that he has been, as it were, more honest, in acknowledging this debt. The word ‘coincidence’ returns here, twice in the same sentence. Repetition is a function of the unheimlich, as Freud reminds us, a compulsion that reveals and reiterates a return of the repressed. This coincidence of coincidences number the fourth and fifth times the word is used in this relatively short textual journey through Chapter 9 of Biographia Literaria, each time tied to the obligation owed to Schelling. We have had the introduction of the ‘contemporary writer of the Continent’, with whom only ‘coincidence’ of thought had been possible; the ‘genial coincidence’ experienced reading Schelling; we have a ‘coincidence [not] at all to be wondered about’; the ‘coincidence’ of Schelling’s system ‘with certain general ideas of Behmen’; and the apparent declaration of Schelling that such a coincidence is ‘mere coincidence’ (1984: 1: 161). Moreover, we note also the recurrence of another key word, ‘obligation’, ‘my obligations’, Coleridge writes, emphasising that such obligations are what are proper to him, and which are now opposed through syntactic parallelism with the idea of Schelling’s ‘mere coincidences’ (1984: 1: 161). To unpack the problem: Schelling claims simply a ‘coincidence’ of thought between his philosophy and Böhme, but this is a claim Coleridge deems incredible. He qualifies this as ‘mere coincidence’, the superfluity of the modifier itself already calling into question whether or not the coincidence was truly coincidental (all coincidences are surely ‘mere coincidences’), and this even before Coleridge italicises the word for added ironic emphasis. Hence, when in the next clause Coleridge compares Schelling’s admission of ‘mere coincidence’ with his own acknowledgement of direct ‘obligations’, he also casts doubt on the motives of Schelling. Coleridge accepts his ‘obligations’: they are his, he ‘owes’ them, and he is prepared to account for them. Not so Schelling: ‘He’—the pronoun here distancing him, italicised for emphasis—‘he needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy’. Comparing this phrasing with the first passage, we note that there, coincidence (which is to say, chance) is the predicate for sympathy: it is because ‘coincidence only was possible’ that sympathetic identification occurs. Indeed, sympathy is difficult here to untangle from identification: sympathy is an affect, from the Greek root of pathos. It is a kind of libidinal investment, and as Paul Hamilton has argued, Coleridge engagement with

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German philosophy during the period might be termed an ‘erotic’ one (2007: 2). Here, however, it is possible to read the prefix, sym- (a carrying over or transcription) in this ‘sympathy’ as signifying cathexis, as in a symptom, with Coleridge’s text here potentially revealing itself as symptomatic. Now, the same predicating structure appears in the later allegations against Schelling, but modified: there, because it is ‘mere coincidence’ (only coincidence, rather than ‘coincidence only’), Schelling needs to give to Böhme ‘only feelings of sympathy’—a diminution of the emotion, demanded only by ‘obligation’. For Schelling, sympathy is something owed, not freely given; for Coleridge, it was the opposite. Coleridge, then, suggests that he has been more honest than Schelling in acknowledging his debts, and if he can demonstrate, however subtly, that he is more credible than Schelling when it comes to acknowledging these influences, then Coleridge’s denial of the influence of Schelling becomes all the more believable. The ghost will be exorcised, the uncanny spectre evaded. Unfortunately for Coleridge, however, it is not so simple as he suggests, and things become more complex precisely in the context of the repetition of terms. Compare one last time the phrasing. Coleridge owes ‘obligations’ to Schelling, as he announced in the headnote, but when taking accounts, he says that there is no debt to reckon in the first place: all had been coincidence. And precisely in so far as ‘coincidence only was possible’, he experiences the ‘pleasure of sympathy’. Schelling, on the other hand, when reckoning his debts, is accused of disingenuousness. That such coincidences could really be ‘mere coincidence’ is incredible. At the moment of definitively reckoning his ‘obligations’ to Schelling, announced in the headnote, Coleridge rather admits ‘obligations’ only towards Böhme. Towards Schelling, nothing is owed, hence the experience of first reading Schelling, this uncanny event, is recalled by Coleridge as an experience of ‘sympathy’ that was intrinsically pleasurable. On the other hand, his own spontaneous ‘pleasure of sympathy’ is compared with Schelling’s begrudging ‘feeling of sympathy’ for Böhme, an emotion now far more ambiguous, seemingly drawn out against his will. Coleridge’s sympathy, on the other hand, is positive precisely since he owes nothing, like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in Ecce Homo (1888), another strange kind of autobiography. In any case, what Coleridge suggests is that if a ‘coincidence’ is a co-incidence, then it is no coincidence at all; which is to say, if a seeming-chance occurrence can be explained by the prior coinciding of lives,

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then it is not a matter of chance. Moreover, what he suggests is that it is only under these conditions of the coincidence of coincidences, only on the condition that there is no obligation as such, that sympathy is experienced. On the other hand, Schelling too experiences sympathy, but this time since the opposite conditions are met, namely that the coinciding of his ideas and Böhme’s are merely coincidence, chance. Both experience sympathy, then, but Coleridge would have us believe that what was experienced as a pleasure by him was painful to Schelling. And yet, Schelling’s pain in sympathy is contrasted (marked in punctuation by the semi-colon) with the pleasure that Coleridge himself experiences, this time not explicitly sympathetic jouissance, but a pleasure in acknowledging his ‘debt of gratitude’: ‘He needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude.’ So, to take account of one’s obligations are, we must conclude, pleasurable in this psychic economy that Coleridge has constructed, a kind of cathectic release. And yet, as we have seen throughout these passages, Coleridge does everything in his power to evade those self-same ‘obligations’ to Schelling. ‘Whether a work is the offspring of a man’s own spirit, and the product of original thinking’ has ‘better tests than the mere reference to dates’, Coleridge protests (1984: 1: 164). And his point carries a certain weight, with some later critics, such as Thomas McFarland, keen to attempt to absolve him of his crimes posthumously. But given the lexical symptoms present in the text itself, we must rather conclude that the question of ‘priority’ cannot be simply distanced, displaced or evaded as Coleridge appears to wish. Perhaps de Quincey was both right and wrong—that what we have here is both ‘barefaced plagiarism’ and, as Coleridge suggests rather more euphemistically, a series of fortuitous ‘coincidences’. For the purposes of this book, the point is moot. What is instructive in our present context is the drama unfolding in the text itself. When trying to account for his obligations to Schelling, Coleridge consistently evades them, and if he speaks of a ‘pleasure of sympathy’, such a pleasure, experienced in a moment of unheimlichkeit, must simultaneously be laced with what Freud calls Unlust, the trace of the Todestrieb [death-drive], as in Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] (1920) where Freud will use the same term, avoidance, Vermeidung, as the economy proper to a pleasure principle under threat or attack (GW 13: 3; SE 18: 7).7 These paragraphs of the Biographia Literaria, I contend from the outset, constitute a kind of Urszene, a primal scene for Schelling’s British

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reception. What we find are two motifs which will haunt the history of this reception up to and including the present day: firstly, we see that Schelling’s influence, the British ‘obligations’ towards Schelling, are never fully taken into account, always to some degree evaded in a symptomatic Vermeidung; and secondly, we see that Schelling is an uncanny presence in British literary history, often there but hidden beneath the surface, an unacknowledged influence.

Which Schelling? The model of the Urszene is instructive. For Freud, the primal scene is the moment of an ‘original’ trauma, a moment which resides in latent symptoms but which insistently returns as the repressed in a process of deferral. Coleridge’s outing as a plagiarist functions as this Urszene for Schelling’s British reception in two linked ways. Firstly, it is a moment of trauma, a very British trauma, the dethroning of the great sage figure, leader of British Romanticism, who is discredited in a moment that for some is simultaneously a discrediting of Romanticism itself. With Romanticism giving way towards the realism of the mid-century, Schelling finds himself archaic, a product of a previous age now wholly out of date. By the late 1850s, for instance, even a writer in many ways sympathetic to Schelling, such as Max Müller (1823–1900), could speak of the Philosophie der Mythologie as being ‘unworthy of the century we live in’ (1870: 2: 144). Secondly, and consecutively, it is a moment which produces Schelling as unheimlich. Almost as if he has been perversely blamed for Coleridge having plagiarised him and for the great sage’s fall from grace, Schelling’s name is no longer welcome. Published references begin to dry up, and his effect becomes uncanny, visible only when hidden, displaced and deferred in figures who rework and repackage his ideas, but who rarely reference his influence by name, in another symptomatic Vermeidung. We begin to see here perhaps one of the underlying reasons why no book has yet examined Schelling’s British reception throughout the nineteenth century. Many of the key figures of nineteenth-century intellectual life were readers of or influenced by Schelling: beyond Coleridge, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881), Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893), George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), Matthew Arnold, George Eliot (1819–1880), Max Müller

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and Walter Pater are just a few of Schelling’s more famous readers. But there is an intrinsic difficulty with posing questions such as ‘How was Schelling received by the British intellectual community?’ or ‘How influential was Schelling in British nineteenth-century thought?’ Such questions imply that the name ‘Schelling’ has a specific signified or presence, but this is precisely what must be called into question when attempting to write any history of Schelling’s reception. Hermeneutic theory owes a great deal to its own responses to Schelling in the work of influential figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and all theories of reception require a consideration of text and a double context: the original text must be situated both in the terms of its initial context (what caused the text to be written? what were its conditions of existence? what allowed the text to be read? on what terms was it engaged with?), but also in terms of the context for its reception. In the case of a study of Schelling’s British reception, the reception is in another country and often many years after the original texts were written. But to ask ‘which Schelling’ also implies coming to terms with the length of Schelling’s career and its considerable development from beginning to end. This book does not seek to give a reading of Schelling, rather a reading of the readings of Schelling. Nevertheless, even for this modest undertaking, an awareness of the general contours of Schelling’s career is essential. Broadly speaking, this career can be broken down into three phases.8 The first was his early transcendental philosophy (1795–1800), which involved a movement away from Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) into Naturphilosophie, a reconsideration of freedom and its relationship to nature understood as spontaneous rather than as formal ground. The second phase was that of his Identitätsphilosophie (1801–1809), his philosophy of identity, marking a definitive break with Fichte, with Schelling characterising the self-conscious ‘I’ as a product of the unconscious forces of nature, rather than a sovereign will reigning over them in an autogenetic Tathandlung or ‘deed-act’ as it had been for Fichte. Finally, the third phase of his later positive philosophy (1809–1854) marked Schelling’s definitive break with Hegel’s ‘negative’ philosophy in his ‘philosophical theology’ which aimed to explain the relationship between the world and God, between finitude and the unconscious Ungrund which preceded it and generated it.

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Complex enough because of its several distinct philosophical stances, an understanding of Schelling’s career is further problematised by his publication history.9 Schelling was prolific in his youth, publishing Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt [On the Possibility of an Absolute Form of Philosophy] in 1794, aged nineteen, while he roomed with Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) at the University of Jena, and Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen [Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge] and Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus [Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism], both in 1795 while working as a private tutor. He published Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre [Essays in Explanation of the Idealism of the Doctrine of Science] in 1796– 1797, before the work that would make his name, his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur [Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature], which resulted in his appointment at the age of only 23 to the post of extraordinary professor at Jena in 1798. There he would lecture to Crabb Robinson, amongst others, and would continue to work on major statements of his Naturphilosophie, his Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie [First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature] (1799), and his System (1800), before the works of his Identitätsphilosophie, including his Bruno (1802), his lectures on Philosophie der Kunst [The Philosophy of Art] of 1802–1803, and his influential Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums [On University Studies] (1803). In the meantime, Hegel had published his Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie [Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy] in 1801, and the two would edit Das Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, 1802–1803, when Schelling moved to take a professorship at Würzburg. During this period, he continued to publish frequently, moving to a professorship in Munich in 1806, a period culminating in the monumental Freiheitsschrift of 1809. At this point, however, Schelling fell into a self-imposed hiatus in terms of publication that would last forty-five years, with only minor exceptions such as a ‘Vorrede’ to Victor Cousin (1792–1867) published in 1834. It is a period of notable ‘Schweigen’ [silence], as Heidegger puts it (1985: 3), and the reasons for this silence have been widely speculated upon. The time is marked by personal tragedy, the death of Schelling’s wife in September 1809. Schelling had married Caroline (1763–1809), one of the Universitätsmamsellen, shortly after she had

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divorced August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), in 1803, and his works in the years following her death are marked by this trauma, in particular the surviving drafts of Die Weltalter [The Ages of the World] (1811–1815), and in the text of Schelling’s only surviving novel, the unpublished Clara (1810). However, the reason for Schelling’s silence may also lie in his broken relationship with his former friend Hegel. In 1807, Hegel published his Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Spirit], in the preface to which he launched a scathing attack on Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie. There, Hegel accuses Schelling of attempting ‘to palm off its Absolute as the night in which […] all cows are black’ (§ 16; 1970: 3:22; 1977: 9), a claim with a double effect of both attacking Schelling’s philosophy and inaugurating his own in an act of usurpation. That the claim was aimed more towards Schelling’s followers than at Schelling himself was an admission drawn out of Hegel’s hand in a letter, but one which he never retracted in print. The two men would not speak for twenty years until a chance encounter on holiday in Carlsbad in 1829. And if Schelling’s philosophy clearly responds to Hegel’s from this moment onwards, particularly in the text of the Freiheitsshcrift and in the positive philosophy of his later years, he did not air his grievances with his old friend openly while the latter still lived. Regardless, it is clear that from this stage onwards, German idealism would become identified with the name of Hegel, and not of Schelling. As Jason M. Wirth puts it, the preface to the Phänomenologie constituted ‘a crushing bit of philosophical realpolitik on Hegel’s part, and to this day Schelling has not fully recovered’ (2005: 3). During this period in the philosophical hinterland, Schelling continued to write even if he did not continue to publish. In addition to Clara and the three known drafts of the Weltalter, from the period dates his lecture to the Bavarian Academy, Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake [On The Deities of Samothrace] (1815), part of the Weltalter project, influential on Coleridge. From 1820 to 1827, he lectured at the University of Erlangen, still working on the Weltalter, and lecturing on both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of mythology, to an audience including the future neo-Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875). Back at Munich, Schelling lectured to audiences including Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855) and John Carlyle (1801–1879), brother to Thomas, and gave his lectures on Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie [Foundations of the Positive Philosophy] in 1832–1833, and probably those on Zur Geschichte der

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neueren Philosophie [On the History of Modern Philosophy] in 1833–1834. But given that these works were not published during this period, with the exception of Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, published explicitly as a Beilage, a supplement to the Weltalter, and so a piece meant to be taken as provisional,10 the reception of Schelling’s thought during the period, with the exception of those who had actually been present at his lectures, would of necessity have been limited. Hegel died in 1831, and ten years later Schelling was invited to succeed him to the chair at the University of Berlin. His lectures there (discussed in Chapter 5) were not only a German event but a European one: in attendance were such figures as Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), Jakob Burkhardt (1818–1897), Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Arnold Ruge (1802–1880), but also a number of influential British figures such as Lewes, Jowett and Stanley. There they listened to Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung [Philosophy of Revelation], a series of lectures which were delivered twice, first in 1841–1842 and then in 1842–1843, with his Philosophie der Mythologie delivered in 1842. Schelling’s return, however, was short lived: when verbatim transcripts of the Philosophie der Offenbarung were published by Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851), his bitter former colleague from Jena, he demanded their suppression as piracy. When the court refused, Schelling ceased all public lectures and ‘quietly faded into obscurity’ (2005: 4), dying on 20 August 1854 in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland. Two years later, his Sämmtliche Werke were issued by his son, Karl Friedrich (1815–1863), in ten volumes, accompanied by a further four volumes of Nachlass, including the Berlin lectures on revelation and mythology, now available for the first time to the reading public. Making sense of the narrative of such a career as Schelling’s, with three periods, each including many moments of reconsideration, and with such long periods of silence in terms of publication, making access to his thought fragmentary at best, is highly problematic. Trying to reckon the nature and extent of his reception and influence is further compounded by the way in which Schelling seems to straddle periods. His career spanned sixty productive years, the period of 1794–1854, beginning at the height of the Romantic movement in Germany, witnessing its recession, the development of idealism and the dominance of Hegel. He lived through the fallout of the French Revolution, witnessed the growing political influence of the Junghegelianer [young Hegelians],

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the rise of higher criticism through David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) and his followers, before he became identified himself with state power in his accession to the chair at Berlin, and in his final years, witnessed the March Revolution of 1848–1849 and its aftermath. But the situation is even more complex in so far as this narrative must be simultaneously read alongside another history: that of Britain and British intellectual history. Such a reading must maintain sensitivity to how texts are read, at what particular moment, and in which context. For instance, to begin with an obvious problem, that of the ‘silence’ and how it was experienced in Britain, we may ask: at what point was Schelling’s positive philosophy first engaged with in British literary history? The answer to this question is highly problematic. We may answer decisively, with the review of Schelling’s lecture Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake in Classical Review in 1816, or, perhaps more pertinently, with Coleridge’s 1825 lecture ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, given to the Royal Society of Literature in London, in which he assimilated and reworked material drawn from Schelling’s lecture of a decade earlier. Since Schelling’s lecture was characterised explicitly as a supplement to the Weltalter, this might constitute the first substantial engagement with Schelling’s positive philosophy. However, by the same token, precisely since this lecture remains supplementary, and not a clear introduction to the positive philosophy itself, perhaps we should date the first substantial engagements to Hare or John Carlyle listening to Schelling lecture in Munich, or Lewes, Stanley and Jowett in Berlin? Again, however, there are issues here: Hare eventually had some things to say about these lectures, but not until after Paulus’ bootlegged versions had surfaced, and Carlyle published nothing; likewise, neither Stanley nor Jowett published immediately on Schelling, and what Lewes did publish seemed content to discuss his Natur- and Identitätsphilosophie. Moreover, most of their readings of Schelling necessarily passed through the prism of that of Coleridge (who Hare was friends with, and who Stanley and Jowett discussed with Schelling in Berlin), so that any reading of Schelling’s positive philosophy by these individuals was inflected by a reading of Coleridge, of Coleridge reading Schelling, of the plagiarism controversy, and of the waning of Romanticism. Given that these figures did not make their opinion of Schelling’s positive philosophy immediately clear in print, the influence of this later phase of his thought is necessarily diffuse, requiring both an archeological reconstruction using as much evidence as possible, drawing on both published and

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unpublished sources, and involving some amount of educated speculation. Or finally, is the moment much later, after the publication of the lectures in the Sämmtliche Werke in 1856–1858, dating perhaps to sometime in the 1860s–1870s, where Müller, who had studied with him in Berlin, or Pater, who would have heard of him first through Jowett, used Schelling’s insights in their own work on comparative mythology and aesthetics? As we will see in the last chapters of this book, it is in Müller’s and Pater’s hands that we begin to see versions of Schelling which have become more and more recognisable in contemporary philosophical discourse today. The implicit question therefore is always which Schelling is being received. But to ask such a question implies at the same time not only an awareness of Schelling’s own career, but how it dovetails and competes with dominant ideas both on the continent and in Britain itself. It also requires a philological sensitivity, since to consider context is always to consider the question as to which of Schelling’s texts, and which editions, each individual had access to and in which language. This is all the more important since only two pieces by Schelling appeared in English during his lifetime, the ‘Introductory Lecture at Berlin’, a bootlegged version of one of the Berlin lectures disseminated by Paulus and published in 1843 in the American Transcendentalist journal The Dial, and the Philosophy of Art, translated by Arthur Johnson in 1845. It is this precarious balancing act that this book attempts to undertake: to trace the reception of Schelling across nineteenth-century British literature, looking not only at which Schelling is being engaged with, but how, in what context and to what end.

Why Schelling? Implied within the question ‘which Schelling’ is another one, which cuts to the heart of our traditional narratives of the history of philosophy and, consequently, the canonical narrative of the history of nineteenthcentury British literature. This question is one that suggests that the stakes of a history of Schelling’s reception in British literature are not limited to those of historical accuracy but constitute a kind of displaced centre to the entire discipline of nineteenth-century studies: the question, why Schelling? To a certain degree, the critical operation here, the very question of Schelling, the putting Schelling into question, is itself always already

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uncanny. To ask ‘why Schelling’ is already to recognise, to some degree, his repression. Indeed, by extension, Schelling’s name simultaneously calls to mind two other names of nineteenth-century German philosophy, so that to ask ‘why Schelling?’ is to simultaneously ask ‘why not Kant or Hegel?’ But perhaps tellingly, the narratives of those two other giants of German philosophy have already been written. John Henry Muirhead (1855–1940) published his influential and somewhat polemical article on ‘How Hegel Came to England’ as early as 1927.11 Likewise, Wellek’s Immanuel Kant in England, published in 1931, remains a canonical work, contending that Kant was the most significant of the German philosophical influences on British thinking during the period 1793–1838, a point which he also developed in essays published during this period and later collected in Confrontations (1965). But Wellek, monumental as his achievement was, was, to speak with Kant, far from ‘disinterested’, writing from a clearly defined position that in some sense compromised his critical neutrality. He had studied idealist philosophy with Otokar Fischer (1883–1938) at Charles University in Prague, which inflected his approach to the subject,12 and Wellek’s perspective on the history of idealism was one in which Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were subordinated to Kant. More significantly, for Wellek, the later idealists added little original to the history of thought, merely helping to disseminate Kant’s striking and original insights to the wider public. A similar charge, but this time of favouring Hegel, may be levelled at Muirhead, who had studied at Glasgow with Edward Caird (1835–1908), a leading figure in British idealism who will be discussed in Chapter 9. For his part, Wellek consequently rejects the influence of Schelling on two of his most important early British readers: he dismisses his influence totally on Thomas Carlyle and minimises it with respect to Coleridge, while simultaneously degrading both of these British writers as little more than pale imitators, not ‘true’ poets or artists in their own right. ‘Historically, of course’, Wellek writes, ‘Coleridge is immensely important and can scarcely be overrated as a transmitter of ideas’ (1931: 68). His subordinate qualification seems unaware of how much it reveals.13 The common narrative constructed by such critics, whether Kantian or Hegelian, is that Schelling’s influence on nineteenth-century British literature was limited almost exclusively to Coleridge and the Romantics.14 For Wirth, for instance, unquestionably one of the most significant and innovative of Schelling’s recent critics, Schelling was

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‘largely ignored in the English speaking world’, with the brief exception of Coleridge (2005: 4).15 This book, while recognising the uncanny presence of Coleridge which often arises in later British readings of Schelling, contests this assumption. If Schelling’s influence did recede to a degree after the plagiarism controversy, it was not the terminal recession it has been thought. Likewise, it is too simplistic to suggest that Schelling was unilaterally deemed irrelevant in later years. Schelling was not simply as an archaic residue of Romanticism out of touch with the later Victorian modernity, nor a helpless intellectual casualty of the rise of Hegelianism in British intellectual life. The latter narrative in particular constitutes one altogether too neat, bypassing Schelling in a kind of Aufhebung or ‘sublimation’ into the figure of Hegel himself: it is a narrative told by Hegelians and by the Hegelians who have often dominated the narrating of British literary and intellectual history, figures such as A. C. Bradley (1851–1935) and his brother F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), key players in the movement of British idealism in the late nineteenth century, the latter of whom was the subject of T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) doctoral dissertation. It is these kinds of hidden lineages which have shaped the way we have traditionally read the history of nineteenthcentury British culture, recalling Paul de Man’s famous claim à propos Hegel that ‘few thinkers have so many disciples who never read a word of their master’s writings’ (1996: 93). On the basis of the evidence presented across this book, the number of figures reading Schelling, engaging with his philosophy, contesting it either directly or diffusely, in a range of different discourses (aesthetics, theology, philosophy and science), this book contests the widelyassumed narrative of Schelling as an aberration in British thought, whether as a footnote to Kant, an immaterial pretender to Hegel, or simply a Romantic ‘mystic’ ill-suited in his foreign ways to flourish in the pragmatic British soil. Schelling is being discussed far too often, and by figures far too influential, to continue to be written off. If there are certain moments when Schelling seems to be beginning to become marginalised, sandwiched between Kant and Hegel, such a marginalisation was only part of the narrative of his reception. This book argues that we must reconsider the received narratives of the British reception of Schelling’s thought. The stakes of such an argument are of importance to the discipline of nineteenth-century studies. To reposition Schelling within the discursive networks of his reception suggests that we may also need to

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effect a wider ideological reconsideration. The misrepresentation of the nineteenth-century British reading of Schelling as a non-reading of Schelling is symptomatic not so much of how the Romantics or Victorians read Schelling, but how we have traditionally read him. Schelling, indeed, has not been read during the majority of the twentieth century. The reasons for this are complex. No doubt the dominance of Hegel from 1807 onwards was to Schelling’s detriment in his homeland, allowing history to be rewritten and Schelling’s influence to be repressed; that neither Wellek nor Muirhead, writing at the end of the 1920s, would give Schelling a voice is unsurprising in this context. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Schelling was virtually forgotten in Germany, let alone in the Anglophone community. Indeed, while Heidegger lectured on Schelling in 1936, he remained a marginal figure until German philosophers in the 1950s began to rediscover him: Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), who reread him as a precursor of existentialism, Jürgen Habermas (1929–), Paul Tillich (1886–1965) and, later, Manfred Frank (1945–). In Anglophone communities, by contrast, it was not until the late 1970s that his influence was rediscovered; before then, to put it bluntly but perhaps not unfairly, Schelling was simply ignored by philosophers and critics alike. The analytic philosophical tradition recognised Kant and, from France as much as from Germany in the form of either phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis or poststructuralism, Hegel would continue to have his champions, or, at least, would refuse to be wholly ignored.16 Schelling, by comparison, was simply bypassed. As an example, let us pause briefly with Bertrand Russell’s (1872–1970) History of Western Philosophy (1946). While the text is often criticised for its omissions in the post-Cartesian tradition, Russell himself considered it less a work of philosophy than of cultural history (2009: 444), but we may take it as indicative of the general temper of the analytic tradition towards idealist philosophy. Only two idealists are given chapters in their own right, Kant and Hegel, with Russell’s position regarding the latter generally negative and his feelings toward the former somewhat ambiguous, although he was forced to admit that Kant had been ‘generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers’ (2004: 639). Indeed, most commentators now accept the fundamental importance of Kant, and a reaction against Kantian categories, as foundational to the analytical philosophical tradition, and in particular to Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000).17 But of Schelling, Russell

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makes mention only once, saying: ‘His [Fichte’s] immediate successor Schelling was more amiable but not less subjective. […] Philosophically, though famous in his day, he is not important’ (2004: 651). Not so much a footnote in the history of western philosophy, Russell, here representing the analytical philosophical tradition, gives Schelling’s remarkable philosophical career two sentences only. Little wonder so few British literary critics or philosophers, under the influence of this analytical tradition, bothered much with Schelling during the first seventy years of the twentieth century. In the late 1970s, however, the situation began to change, with translations published of a number of Schelling’s major works, including the System and Ideen.18 In recent years, particularly since the turn of the century, the interest in Schelling has increased exponentially, witnessing the establishment of new journals and the North American Schelling Society, and a number of new translations of his works.19 Driven by a number of major English-language Schelling critics such as Andrew Bowie, David Farell Krell, Tilottama Rajan, Jason Wirth, and Slavoj Žižek, Schelling’s visibility has been raised. He has been rediscovered for his anticipations of poststructuralist and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought. Finally, it seems, like a return of the repressed, Schelling is emerging from under the shadow of Hegel. It is easy to dismiss someone if you haven’t read them, and many of the critics who have hitherto hastily dismissed the influence of Schelling on figures discussed in the course of this book would have done well to have read more Schelling. But reading Schelling, the question of ‘which Schelling’ returns: as we see throughout this book and as evidenced by the wide variety of engagements with Schelling’s ideas, operating in different historical contexts across the period and within different discursive regimes, we cannot afford to simply speak of Schelling’s ‘philosophy’ as if it were singular. Neither Schelling, nor the nineteenth-century British engagement with Schelling, can be reduced to a Naturphilosophie, deemed synonymous with Romanticism and dismissed as ‘mysticism’ by its detractors. Instead, we see that Schelling’s positive philosophy, in which he broke with Hegel, had a continuing influence throughout the period. It is in these ‘positive’ guises that Schelling has been rediscovered in recent years as a radical philosophical outsider, but what we discover through the course of this book is that this Schelling was already known to some of the Victorians, and was already being actively engaged with during the late nineteenth century.

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Debts and Obligations This book has three primary aims. First and foremost, it seeks to establish the importance of Schelling throughout nineteenth-century British literature, thereby demonstrating that interest in Schelling was not limited to his Naturphilosophie or to the Romantics. Secondly, and concurrently, it seeks to reconceive the narrative of the reception of German idealism during the nineteenth century as it has been traditionally understood. For while critics such as Elinor Shaffer and, more recently, James Vigus and Monika Class, have sought to problematise the narrative handed down by Wellek to successive generations of critics, there still remains the tendency to overlook Schelling in favour of either Kant or Hegel. This book does not dispute their importance, but wishes to draw out an alternative genealogy, and to thereby prepare the ground to allow for a subtle re-landscaping of nineteenth-century studies. Thirdly, and finally, the book seeks, as far as possible, to draw a coherent narrative of the history of Schelling’s reception across the entire period of the nineteenth century for the first time. I say as far as possible, because as we shall see, in some of the spheres in which he was being read, the various competing versions of Schelling and the various competing interpretations of his philosophy come together to create an incoherent palimpsest: in theology, for instance, Schelling was claimed and denigrated alike and in almost equal measure by Dissenters, the Broad Church movement and Catholics. Still, while critics have discussed Schelling’s relevance to individual figures discussed in these pages, this book offers the first collation of these disparate traces and attempt to view the picture of the period taken as a whole (although, of course, it cannot pretend to claim to be a complete portrait). As such, my interest is only peripherally in what Schelling actually said or the nitty gritty of his own arguments. This is a study in reception and so my interest necessarily gravitates to the questions of how Schelling was read, what his British readers thought he said (rather than necessarily what he did actually say), and—most crucially— the use to which they sought to put Schelling’s ideas in sometimes very different contexts. The book is divided into 11 chapters. The next two chapters deal with Schelling’s early reception, falling within roughly the first three decades of the century. Chapter 2 looks at Schelling’s reception in the Romantic tradition, 1794–1819, centring on Coleridge only to decentre this tradition. Dealing with the earlier reception by Crabb Robinson, who

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studied with him at Jena, and discussions of Schelling in the journalism, 1794–1810, the chapter will also deal with other figures influential in the initial period of Schelling’s popularisation, such as Germaine de Staël (1766–1817). Chapter 3 deals with the Scottish reception, 1817–1833. The central figure here is William Hamilton, arguably the most significant voice in British philosophy in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, before the chapter concludes with a major reassessment of the work of one of his friends, Thomas Carlyle. It focuses on the way in which the central drama of Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) constitutes an in-depth engagement with a number of Schelling’s concepts, such as that of Indifferenz, one which also served to popularise them, although in a manner unattributed and thus constituting another of Schelling’s uncanny echoes. Chapter 4 deals with the aftermath of this initial Romantic enthusiasm for Schelling, by focusing on the plagiarism controversy precipitated by de Quincey. This chapter discusses a key moment in the history of the British reception of Schelling: from this point onwards, many British engagements with Schelling will become framed by this narrative, an effect still being felt. Likewise, the fifth and six chapters also deal with the period during which a Romantic response to Schelling was transitioning into a Victorian one. Chapter 5 examines Schelling’s depiction in the British media from 1841 onwards, when he succeeded Hegel as Professor in Berlin at the invitation of the Prussian King. Teasing out the ideological significance of these events from a British perspective, the chapter will then look at the meeting of Jowett and Stanley with Schelling in 1845, discussing the importance of this meeting for these two key figures of Victorian life. Chapter 6 broadens the analysis to examine Schelling’s influence on a vast array of major figures of Victorian intellectual life, including the banker Andrew Johnson, who translated Schelling’s Akademierede in 1845, Arnold, Eliot, Lewes, as well as others. The next three chapters look thematically at Schelling’s significance in three different discourses: theology, science and philosophy. Chapter 7 examines Schelling’s reception in British theology, dealing with major figures such as James Martineau (1805–1900) and John Cairns (1818–1892), who heard Schelling lecture in Berlin. Chapter 8 looks at the role played by the reception of Naturphilosophie on British scientists such as Joseph Henry Green (1791–1863), Humphry Davy (1778–1829), Richard Owen (1804–1892), and more diffusely,

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on Charles Darwin (1809–1882), before looking at the way in which Schelling’s contribution to science contributed to the development of the agnostic movement, particularly through the interpretation of Hamilton by Henry Longueville Mansel (1820–1871). Chapter 9 looks at the influence of Schelling’s role in the debate surrounding the British university reform movement, before looking at the philosophical responses to Schelling during the mid to late nineteenth century at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, Manchester’s Owens College, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Taking seriously Russell’s assertion that ‘by the end of the nineteenth century’, the period when he himself attended Cambridge (1890–1893, elected Fellow of Trinity in 1895), ‘the leading academic philosophers […] were largely Hegelians’ (2004: 661), and Richard Burdon Haldane’s (1856–1928) contemporary estimation of 1895 that Oxford had been ‘the cradle of a Hegelian movement’ (1895: 233), the focus is turned to evaluating the ways in which Schelling was treated by the British idealist tradition.20 Chapter 10 focus on the later nineteenth century and Schelling’s uncanny return in the discourses of Victorian mythology and aesthetics. Beginning once again with Coleridge, and his coining of the term ‘tautegory’, this chapter considers the importance of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. The central focus here is Müller, who had studied with Schelling in Berlin, looking at the way in which Schelling’s ideas were repackaged and redistributed to a late nineteenth-century British audience. The chapter concludes by focusing on the way in which Schelling’s ideas were adopted by the aestheticism movement, proposing a major reassessment of the work of Pater, based on new evidence from close textual analysis. The conclusion develops from these later Victorian responses to Schelling, by looking forward from Schelling’s late nineteenth-century reception towards psychoanalysis and critical theory. Tracing a path from Müller and Pater on the unconscious, through William James (1842–1910) and on to Freud on the uncanny, the conclusion then evaluates Schelling’s significance to contemporary continental philosophical discourse. This book, then, hopes to achieve a kind of hermeneutic archeology that may help to re-orientate the way in which we read the German philosophical influence on the nineteenth-century world of letters. No longer can we speak of the Romantic flirtation with Schelling as a kind of blip or aberration. Just because Schelling is rarely named in print in the mid to late nineteenth century, this is not to say that he was not present

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or that his influence was not felt. Whether that subterranean influence be positive or marked by a kind of anxiety, this book seeks to unearth the uncanny Schelling and bring him back to light. As such, what we discover is that the Schelling that has been rediscovered in recent critical traditions is one that was always there, waiting to be unearthed. Indeed, as we shall see throughout this book, many of the nineteenth-century British readers of Schelling through him also figure as unheimlich harbingers, ‘dark precursors’ of key contemporary philosophical issues. If the nineteenth-century response to Schelling is marked by a symptomatic Vermeidung, one which is also common to much contemporary criticism, then Schelling echoes and reverberates throughout the century as that return of the repressed which refuses to go silently into the night in which all cows are black.

Notes





1. On Schelling and Freud, see Bowie (2010), ffytche (2012), and McGrath (2013). For an influential Lacanian approach to Schelling and psychoanalysis, see Žižek (1996). 2.  The literature on Coleridge and Schelling is extensive. For significant landmarks, or for treatments I have found helpful, see McFarlan (1969), Orsini (1969), Pfau (1984: 269–277), Hedley (2000), Berkley (2007), Hamilton (2007), and Vigus (2009). Class (2012), while less focused on Schelling, looks at Coleridge’s early reception of Kant within the context of wider literary networks, in a way germane to this study and from which I have learnt a lot. With respect to the Biographia Literaria, the editorial apparatus provided by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate to their edition for The Collect Works is exemplary. 3.  See Freud’s comments in his Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis] (GW 11: 407–426; SE 16: 392–411). 4. The Pantheismusstreit was a debate that raged in German philosophy and theology 1785–1789, centred on the interpretation of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). As Frederick Beiser writes, discussing the significance of the pantheism controversy on Schelling, it is ‘no exaggeration to say that the pantheism controversy had as great an impact upon nineteenth-century philosophy as Kant’s first Kritik’ (1987: 44). On the importance of the pantheism controversy in the early development of Schelling’s philosophy, see Bowie (2003: 17–25), and on Coleridge and the Pantheismusstreit, see McFarland (1969). 5. See Bloom (1972), an essay which first announced the concept of the ‘anxiety of influence’ through a close reading of Coleridge, one that was

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to be developed the following year in The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Perhaps significantly, Bloom’s argument in the earlier essay turns on a reading of Coleridge framed by Pater’s reading in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ (1866), a text which, as we shall see in Chapter 10, perhaps turns on Pater’s own anxiety over the influence of Schelling on the development of his own thought. 6. Indeed, not only bathetic, but an acknowledgment that had not yet taken place. It was not, as Engell and Bate note in their edition of Biographia Literaria, until Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie [On the History of Modern Philosophy], the Munich lectures of 1833–1834, appearing posthumously in the Sämmtliche Werke (1856–1861), that the debt to Böhme would be explicitly acknowledged by Schelling. 7. It was another moment of pleasurable ‘coincidence’ when it was pointed out to me by a colleague that my reading here skirts that of Derrida in La carte postale (1980), a text I had read years earlier but was not consciously attempting to bring into my analysis. I now recognise that my analysis applies similar deconstructive insights linking Freud’s texts, but with the difference of using them in the context of an analysis of Coleridge’s ‘obligations’ towards Schelling. To hereby reckon the debt, I refer my readers to Derrida (1979: 259–291). 8. This is not the place to go into a lengthy debate over the periodisation of Schelling’s career: I use the standard three-phase characterisation of Schelling’s career simply to map one broad way of following its trajectory, and I am aware it has come under recent scrutiny from a number of scholars: see, for instance, Nassar (2014: 157–257), for a problematisation of the early Schelling, and the more general reconsideration of Schelling’s periodization, see Wirth (2015). 9. What follows is essentially an intellectual biography of Schelling’s career, read through his bibliography. This approach has its limitations given that many figures dealt with in this book, such as Crabb Robinson or Jowett or Müller, met Schelling himself and so were also influenced by the man as much as the works. Nevertheless, since those figures are in the minority, I proceed advisedly. For by far the best biography of Schelling thus far written, see Tilliette (1999). No comparable English language text is currently available. 10. As David Farrell Krell has pointed out, playing off Derrida on supplementarity, this means that the Weltalter is the ‘only philosophical work whose sole published part is a supplement to the unpublished main work’ (2005: 135). 11. Muirhead’s essay on ‘How Hegel Came to England’ would be followed the next year by ‘How Hegel Came to America’ (1928). For later accounts of significance, see Bradley (1979: 1–24, 163–182) and den Otter (1996), who emphasises the political significance of Hegel to British idealism.

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12. On the influence of Fischer on Wellek, see Shaffer (2015: 14–26). 13. For his similar treatment of Carlyle, see Wellek (1965: 36). 14. To be fair, Muirhead is far more sympathetic in assessing Coleridge’s originality as a thinker than Wellek, publishing a monograph on Coleridge as Philosopher: see in particular (1930: 50–59) on Coleridge’s ‘Debt to Kant and Schelling’. 15. In The Conspiracy of Life, Wirth notes that ‘Coleridge was not the only notable appreciative reader of Schelling’ (2003: 39), but does not develop the point. Nor should he need to: his work treats Schelling as a philosopher and has a different remit from the present study, which aims to think through Schelling as a kind of ‘event’ in British literature. 16. The complex history of Hegel’s reading in France, often said to be inaugurated by the lectures given by Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1933–1939, has been the subject of a number of studies: see, for instance, Butler (1987) and Baugh (2003). 17. See Hanna (2004) and Reed (2007). For a reading of the contemporary politics of Anglo-German relations with respect to the analytical tradition, see Akehurst (2011); although he mentions Schelling only once, his insights are germane to my argument here. 18.  The dates were: the System (1978), Bruno (1984), Ideas (1988a), Philosophy of Art (1988b, in Minnesota University Press’s influential Theory and History of Literature Series), and On the History of Modern Philosophy (1994). 19. SUNY published the Ages of the World (2000), Clara (2002), the First Outline (2004), the Essence of Human Freedom and The Grounding of Positive Philosophy (both 2006), the Philosophy of Mythology (2007), and the Rupture between Fichte and Schelling (2012). 20. We hear in Russell’s voice here some of the antipathy towards idealism in general. As he noted later in retrospect, ‘I fought every inch of the way against Idealism in Metaphysics and Ethics’ (2009: 95); see also Russell (2009: 375–376), on the influence of George Edward Moore (1873–1958) on this shift away from idealism.

Works Cited Akehurst, Thomas L. 2011. The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe. London: Continuum. Baugh, Bruce. 2003. French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Beiser, Frederick. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Berkley, Richard. 2007. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bloom, Harold. 1972. Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence. Diacritics 2 (1): 36–41. ———. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2003. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. The Philosophical Significance of Schelling’s Conception of the Unconscious. In Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, ed. Angus Nicholls and Martin Leibscher, 57–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradley, James. 1979. Hegel in Britain. The Heythrop Journal 20: 1–24, 163–182. Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Class, Monika. 2012. Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817: Coleridge’s Responses to German Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury. Coleridge, S.T. 1984. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Man, Paul. 1996. Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics. In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, 91–104. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Quincey, Thomas. 2003. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Articles from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1834–8, ed. Alina Clej, 287–347, vol. 10 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. den Otter, Sandra. 1996. British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1979. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ffytche, Matt. 2012. The Foundation of the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1940–1952. GW. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols. London: Imago. ———. 1999. SE. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: Vintage. Haldane, R.B. 1895. Hegel. Contemporary Review 67: 232–245. Hamilton, Paul. 2007. Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic. London: Continuum. Hanna, Robert. 2004. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. London: Routledge. Hedley, Douglas. 2000. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1970. Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise: On Essence Human Freedom. Athens: Ohio University Press. Krell, David Farrell. 2005. The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McFarland, Thomas. 1969. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGrath, S.J. 2013. The Dark Ground of Spirit. London: Routledge. Muirhead, J.H. 1927. How Hegel Came to England. Mind 36: 423–447. ———. 1928. How Hegel Came to America. The Philosophical Review 37 (3): 226–240. ———. 1930. Coleridge as Philosopher. London: Macmillan. Müller, Friedrich Max. 1870. Chips from a German Workshop, 4 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Nassar, Dalia. 2014. The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1805. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Orsini, Gian N.G. 1969. Coleridge and German Idealism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Pfau, Thomas. 1984. Idealism and the Endgame of Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. Reed, Delbert. 2007. The Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Kant and Frege. London: Continuum. Russell, Bertrand. 2004. History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge. ———. 2009. Autobiography. London: Routledge. Schelling, F.W.J. 1843. The Introductory Lecture at Berlin. The Dial 11 (January): 398–404. ———. 1845. The Philosophy of Art: An Oration on the Relation Between the Plastic Arts and Nature, trans. A. Johnson. London: John Chapman. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher. ———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1974. HKA. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Jörg Jantzen, and Hermann Krings, 40 vols. Stuttgart: Freidrich Frommann. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 1984. Bruno, or On the Nature and Divine Principle of Things, trans. Michael G. Vater. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 1988a. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1988b. Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2002. Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World, trans. Fiona Steinkamp. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2004. First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Pearson. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2006. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2007. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. Albany: SUNY Press. Shaffer, Elinor. 2015. Coleridge’s English Afterlife. In The Reception of S.T. Coleridge in Europe, ed. Elinor Shaffer and Edoardo Zuccato, 14–26. London: Bloomsbury. Tilliette, Xavier. 1999. Schelling. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Vater, Michael G., and David W. Wood (eds.). 2012. The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondences. Albany: SUNY Press. Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press. Vigus, James. 2009. Platonic Coleridge. London: Legenda. Wellek, René. 1931. Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1965. Confrontations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wirth, Jason M. 2003. The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. (ed.). 2005. Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2015. Schelling’s Practice of the Wild. Albany: SUNY Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1996. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

Schelling’s Reception in British Romanticism, 1794–1819

Perhaps it will come as a surprise to find that Schelling’s name first appears in print in English as early as August 1794, well before he was even a notable figure in Germany. That month, the British Critic carried a brief review of the fifth volume of Heinrich Paulus’s journal, Memorabilien, in which Schelling published his very first piece, ‘Über Mythen, historische Sagen und Philosopheme der ältesten Welt’ [On myths, historical legends and philosophemes of the Ancient World]. The reviewer noted the essay without analysis, but commented on its young author, who ‘has distinguished himself, by a very learned and ingenious Dissertation’ on Genesis III (Anon. 1794: 208). The citation, if brief, complicates the received narrative of Schelling’s reception: it shows the extent to which interest in German philosophy during the period was keener than has often been acknowledged, and the important role which British reviews played in disseminating these new ideas.1 This chapter will begin by describing these negotiations in the pages of Romantic periodicals, before moving on to discuss some of the initial engagements with Schelling undertaken by three of the biggest names in the Romantic tradition: those of Henry Crabb Robinson, Germaine de Staël and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

© The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_2

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Schelling in the Periodical Press, 1796–1810 After this very early review, Schelling’s name slipped from public view for the next four years. He reappears again in a review of Davide Julio Pott’s (1760–1838) Commentatio on Genesis (1797) in the Monthly Review. The reviewer was Alexander Geddes (1737–1802), who remarks of Pott’s ‘very curious dissertation’ that it ‘tread[s] in the steps of Eichhorn and Schelling’ (1798: 498).2 Geddes was an important conduit for the British reception of German thought in the late eighteenth century, and Elinor Shaffer notes that Coleridge carried a letter from Geddes to Paulus when he travelled to Germany (1975: 28), asking that the young poet be recommended to the University of Jena: ‘pay some attention to him. You will find him a man of talents and information, who will do no dishonour to your recommendations’ (Woudenberg 2018: 77). That we should find Schelling being referred to, and so early, in the pages of the Monthly Review is unsurprising, given the significant role that this periodical played in spreading German literature and philosophy in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, particularly before the Edinburgh Review was revived in 1802.3 It was in the Monthly Review that figures such as William Taylor of Norwich (1765– 1836) and Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), a close friend of Coleridge, would publish important early essays on Kant (Taylor 1797, 1798, 1799; Beddoes 1796), but in point of fact, the Review’s role in the dissemination of Schelling’s thought was less significant than that played by one of its chief competitors, the Monthly Magazine. Still, the Review did carry occasional notices of Schelling during the first decade of the nineteenth century. These included Charles Butler’s (1750–1832) review of Johann Georg Meusel’s (1743–1820) History of Literature, published in 1805, which noted Schelling’s contributions to natural science (492), and a review of Friedrich Ancillon’s (1767–1837) Mélanges de Littérature (1809) by Christian Ernst Schwabe (1777–1843).4 The Minister of the German Lutheran Church in Little Alie Street, Goodman’s Fields, Schwebe was later Princess Victoria’s German tutor, but if he spoke to the future Queen of kritische Philosophie, she would have heard that Schelling was someone who had sought to ‘make the universe’ his own, but in so doing, had ‘render[ed] useless […] the world in which [he] live[d]’ (1810: 510). Butler’s allusion to Schelling’s contributions to natural science is significant, for it was often in this context that his name was registered

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in the British periodical press during these early years. The London Medical and Physical Journal carried the first review of Schelling’s Ideen in English in April 1800. The anonymous author spoke of the text that would establish Schelling’s reputation as a ‘profound work’, remarkable for its ‘spirit of enquiry’ (Anon. 1800a: 385). The review speaks of Schelling’s theories of ‘the combustion of bodies, of light and heat, of air, electricity, and the magnet’ (385), recommending in particular its contributions to the philosophy of chemistry (386), and noting his bold reply to Newtonian physics (385). But the largest of the four paragraphs of the review was given over to an exposition of Schelling’s philosophical method, rather than the particularities of his Naturphilosophie, as that quality which ultimately distinguished his treatise, although in the end, the reviewer considered the work more ‘original, than fundamental’ (385). Still, they were kinder than the reviewer of Erster Entwurf, in a notice which appeared in the New Annual Register that same year. ‘Intended to apply the principles of the new philosophy to chemistry’, the anonymous reviewer wrote, Schelling’s work was ‘drawn up in a manner so abstracted and obscure, as to greatly detract from its merit’ (1800b: 347). The association of Schelling with contemporary medical developments continued two years later when the Medical and Physical Journal carried an abridged translation of an ‘Inquiry into the Influence of Chemistry on the Operation of Animal Bodies’. The Dutch author, Conrad George Ontyd (1776–1844), invokes Schelling’s theory of ‘vitality’ to the aid of his argument, as that which ‘forms the various materials of the human body into an organized whole’ (1802: 463). Ontyd’s treatise was controversial, and the next few numbers of the Medical and Physical Journal saw a number of British medical professionals write in to take issue with his theories.5 North of the border, The Scots Magazine carried a discussion of the state of German medicine that same year which noted ‘the prevailing system of medical Theory, in Germany, at present, is a modification of excitability, which was first promulgated by our countryman Brown’ (Anon. 1802a: 252–253). The allusion is to John Brown (1735–1788), whose work Schelling read (discussed in more detail in Chapter 8). Schelling’s recent break with Fichte is discussed a little later on in the review, before the author comments sagely: ‘in this state of philosophy, we much fear, that there is little science or truth. Wild theory and the insatiable rage for innovation, are strange teachers of the immutable laws of nature’ (1802a: 253). A similar complaint was levelled

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six years later in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in a piece ‘On the Present State of Medical Science in Germany’. Schelling’s philosophy, according to this Scotsman, is ‘the result of premature metaphysical generalizations’ and, like his fellow countryman, the author puts Schelling’s success down to the vagaries of fashion, since such lofty speculations […] are less surprising, when we consider how great the demand is for philosophical novelty; how many universities there are, and how many professors of philosophy in each, who must think, in order to live, and must publish all they can think. (1808: 72)

‘It is difficult to give an idea of what [Schelling’s] philosophy consists’, the author quips, ‘and, anywhere but in Germany, one would be astonished to hear men of sense and reflection declare, that what is called empiricism, sensible experience, and experimental philosophy, are necessarily and demonstrably false’ (1808: 71). Ultimately, however, it was through the pages of the Monthly Magazine that British readers would have been most likely to have heard the name Schelling. The Monthly Magazine was established in 1796 by John Aikin (1774–1822), a Unitarian who, along with his sister, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825), published the popular series of volumes Evenings at Home (1792–1795). The magazine would feature the work of many important Romantics, including Coleridge, William Blake (1757–1827) and Charles Lamb (1775–1834), and in its half-yearly retrospects of recent literature, Schelling’s latest publications were often noted. His name first appeared in its pages in January 1802, noting the publication of the second number of the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, in which ‘the Schellingean transcendental philosophy received important contributions’ (1802b: 608). The proper adjective here registers the fact that, by this point, even British reviewers had begun to recognise the significance of Schelling’s new school. A notice of the Differenzschrift a few lines on portrays Hegel as Schelling’s lackey, who has been brought forth ‘from his native place to Jena [as] a champion’, and who is characterised as a kind of dummy through which Schelling ventriloquizes, ‘announc[ing] to the astonished public how much even Fichte is beneath him’ (1802b: 609). Half a year later, in June 1802, the Monthly Magazine carried an account of the university of Jena, where ‘the Brunonian system has lately acquired many partisans, through the means of Professor Schelling, who has ingeniously united it with his system of

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his philosophy’ (1802c: 433).6 Most interestingly, the correspondent notes that ‘the senior Professors’ at Jena ‘are not quite convinced of the truth’ of Schelling’s new philosophy (1802c: 433). The half-year retrospect that winter contained the most detailed attempt published so far in the British periodical press to take account of Schelling’s new philosophical project, although the author was more hostile than his earlier colleagues. Noting recent developments in German poetry, the reviewer bemoans that ‘the Germans are become so philosophical, or at least ratiocinating a people, that they compose even good or bad poems in proportion as they embrace and follow a rational or absurd system of philosophising’ (1803a: 646). While Kant’s ‘authority [had] now vanished’, ‘a host of younger literati, whose chief merit consists in having understood the critical philosophy of Kant, now looked down upon him with a kind of superciliousness’ (1803a: 646). Such a diagnosis of their ‘chief merit’ served to minimise the significance and contribution of these new thinkers. Schelling is deemed the main culprit, who has ‘taught the most absurd idealism’, although in point of fact the adjective is redundant, for the reviewer considers all idealism alike to be absurd, all alike to be subjective idealism, and all alike to be marked by an irredeemable arrogance, ‘for what deference needs he [Schelling] to pay to beings which he considers to be only the creations of his own brain’ (1803a: 647). Incredulous that ‘hundreds of youths heard their assertions thence trumpeted forth as the most sublime truths’, the reviewer considers the current ‘Schellingean’ state of German philosophy a ‘scandalous and ridiculous farce’ in which ‘a troop of beardless boys [are] schooling the men’ (1803a: 647). The point is taken up again by a reviewer six months later. Summarising Schelling’s new Naturphilosophie briefly, the reviewer notes that ‘the influence of the new philosophy […] becomes daily more visible, in proportion as these speculative studies become more fashionable at the German universities, which may be considered as hot-beds of new systems’. There, ‘the various sects of Kantians, Fichteans, Schellingeans, &c. are zealously contending with one another’ (1803b: 668). Later, the reviewer notes the continued Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik as the place where Schelling ‘more and more develops his “Philosophy of Nature”’, as well as the publication of Schelling and Hegel’s joint Das Kritische Journal der Philosophie. They pass little comment on the particulars, however, simply opining that ‘both are distinguished by violent Philippics against the oppugners of the new doctrine’ (1803b: 669).

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The British reader who picked up the Monthly Magazine during this period would become well aware of the partisan politics at work in the hyper-competitive Jena philosophical scene, where friends ‘loaded their partizans with encomiums’ (1803a: 647), before they inevitably fell out. The influential periodical Das Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung was deemed a chief culprit for this kind of petty squabbling and score settling (1803a: 647), and by the end of 1803, the British reviewer complained that it had ‘lost much of its authority and value’ (1803b: 687). The diffusion of ‘Schellingeans’ was noted in the half-yearly retrospect of July 1804. Jakob Friedrich Fries’s (1773–1843) Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling (1803) is recommended for its ‘good style’, while Schelling had apparently recently ‘met with an equally formidable opponent’ in the work of Friedrich Köppen (1775–1858) (Anon. 1804a: 670). Schelling himself is noted not only for his continued journals, but the second edition of the Ideen and for the publication of the Methode. He has ‘continued […] to acquire more disciples and adherents; especially in the Southern provinces of Germany, where his influence will in future be much increased by his appointment to a professorship at the university of Wurzburg’, where he would find ‘colleagues of the same way of thinking’ (1804a: 670). These colleagues would include Johann Jakob Wagner (1775–1841), whose own recent arrival from Saltzberg is noted by the reviewer (1804a: 670). In Wagner and Adolf Karl August Eschenmayer (1768–1853), Schelling would find two of his most prodigious disciples, according to the author (1804a: 670–671). Earlier that same year, the first number of the newly resuscitated Universal Magazine had also noted Schelling’s change of scene to Würtzburg, and that his lectures ‘attract a great number of auditors, not only students, but persons of all situations in life’ (Anon. 1804b: 173). The allusion to Schelling’s crowded lectures anticipates the keen interest in the British periodical press in the early 1840s when Schelling took up Hegel’s old Chair in Berlin (discussed in Chapter 5), but also registers the ways in which he was already deemed something of a celebrity by the British reviewers, watching his remarkable rise from afar. Readers had the opportunity to hear in more detail about Schelling’s system in October 1804, when the Monthly Magazine carried a commissioned article ‘On the Present State of Philosophy in Germany’ by Johann Gottfried Schweighäuser (1776–1844), who had served as tutor to the children of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), and who had recently arrived in London to prepare an edition of the Athenaeus of

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Naucratis. Schweighäuser was not impressed by ‘the audacious flight’ of Schelling’s system, which could ‘not be read without astonishment’ (1804: 206). He ‘produces all nature, at pleasure’, and Schweighäuser notes with irony ‘the confidence with which he asserts the strangest paradoxes’ (1804: 207). For Schweighäuser, One of the most singular results of this philosophy, taught in a Protestant country, and nearly approaching Atheism, is the return of its disciples towards the Catholic religion; not as being the true religion, but as being the most poetical and more favourable to that mystical exaltation of the mind which has so much analogy to the abstracts of the highest department of metaphysics. (1804: 207)

Schweighäuser’s attack on Schelling’s supposed atheism will be a popular refrain for some of Schelling’s readers in British theology, as will the association of his thought with Catholicism. But Schweighäuser concludes by noting what he deems the ‘considerable success’ that philosophical opponents of Schelling had recently enjoyed, suggesting he felt its days were numbered. Indeed, his point is perhaps in part borne out by the fact that Schelling’s name begins to fade out from the Monthly Magazine in the following years. While the retrospects of January 1805 included a notice of Schelling’s Philosophie und Religion, as well as notices of new works by ‘Schellingeans’ such as Josef Reubel (1779– 1852), Eschenmayer, Fries and Wagner (1805a: 624–625), Schelling’s importance—if the British reader were to rely on the intelligence of the Monthly Magazine—was on the wane in Germany. In October 1805, Schelling’s name appears for the final time in the pages of this particular periodical during the decade, with the announcement that ‘the University of Landshut has offered the degree of doctor of philosophy to any one of its pupils who should point out in the clearest manner […] the materials of which Professor Schelling has composed his philosophy’ (1805b: 259). Perhaps here were the germs of another plagiarism controversy.

Henry Crabb Robinson in Jena Henry Crabb Robinson travelled to Germany in April 1800 at the age of twenty-four. A Dissenter from a Presbyterian background, he had not been able to attend university in England and so sought to study

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abroad. There, he discovered Kant, whose work he came to interpret as something of a reply to the theory of ‘philosophical necessity’ of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), the dissenting theologian who had founded Unitarianism (Vigus in Robinson 2010: 2–3). In Frankfurt, Crabb Robinson befriended Christian Brentano (1784–1851), the Romantic writer, brother to Clemens (1778–1842), the poet, and sister to Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859), the novelist famous for her correspondence with Goethe, published as Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835); Franz Brentano (1838–1917), Christian’s son, would later become a psychologist whose work was influential on Freud and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Crabb Robinson effused about Christian in a letter to his brother as ‘an intellig[en]t & judicious Admirer & Disciple of Kant’ whose ‘zeal for the new Critical Philosophy’ brought them together (Morley 1929: 68).7 He walked with Christian to visit Clemens in Göttingen during the summer of 1801, where he met August Stephan Winkelmann (1780–1806), who ‘first distinctly taught me the new German philosophy’ through which ‘Schelling was rising to fame’ (1869: 1: 88). Crabb Robinson was struck by ‘a curious trait of the new school. They are all poetico-metaphysical religionists. Clemens Brentano declared religion to be “philosophy taught through mystery”’ (1869: 1: 88; Morley 1929: 74). He worked hard on understanding Kant during this period and in October, he arrived in Jena to continue his study; he would stay there nearly three years. He lodged at the house of Fries (Stelzig 2010: 64), who Crabb Robinson calls ‘the most distinguished Kantianer at that time’ (1869: 1: 131), and who, as we have seen, was a figure who himself was beginning to garner some attention back in Britain as a supposed disciple of Schelling. Crabb Robinson’s gradual attempts to form an understanding of Schelling are recorded in his diaries. He was regimented and persistent. He records ‘tak[ing] up Schellings Journal of Speculative Physick And, comparing the Paragrap[h]s […] with the Notes I took last Friday at the Lecture, try[ing] to squeese out a little sense or meaning’ (Morley 1929: 116; Robinson 1869: 1: 126). He attended a number of courses at Jena, including one by Johann Heinrich Voigt (1751–1832) on experimental physics, which gives an idea of the naturphilosophisches millieu of Jena during the period. Crabb Robinson notes Voigt’s ‘original Hypothesis of the 2 sorts of ffire Male & ffemale’, and his explanation of ‘The Laws if attract[io]n & repulsion in the physical world as resembling the Debit & Credit of a Merchants Cash Book’ (Morley 1929: 116–117;

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Robinson 1869: 1: 127). He recalls rushing to attend Schelling’s lectures on aesthetics straight from an anatomy lecture, and purify[ing] my fancy polluted by the inspection of rotten carcasses & smoked Skeletons, by hearing the modern Plato read for a whole hour […]: I shall in spite of the obscurity of a philosophy compounded of the most profound abstraction, & enthusiastic mysticism; be interested by par[ticu]lar ingenious remarks & amused by extravagant Novelties. (Morley 1929: 117; Robinson 1869: 1: 128)

There is both the earnest desire to grapple with Schelling during this period, and a kind of detached irony with which he find himself ‘amused’ by the spectacle. Indeed, Crabb Robinson openly admitted his difficulties in comprehension, and allows himself a wry reflection on the spectacle of others doing the same at Schelling’s lecture on Speculative Philosophy, a little later that same day: I shall be animated if I happen to be in an enthusiastick frame, at the Sight of more than 130 enquiring Young Men listening with attentive ears to the Exposition of a Phil[osoph]y in its pretensions more glorious than any publicly maint[aine]d since the days of Plato […] But if I happen to be more prosaically tuned, I shall smile at the good nature of so great an assembly; who because it is the fashion listen so patiently to a detail which not one in 20 comprehends And which fills their head only with dry formularies and mystical rhapsodical phraseology. (Morley 1929: 117; Robinson 1869: 1: 128–129)

Also revealing are the comments that Schelling passes on British philosophy during the period. Crabb Robinson notes Schelling’s contemptuous treatment of his countrymen such as Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Edmund Burke (1729–1797), ‘the thick-skinned [Samuel] Johnson [1709–1784] & the “shallow” Priestley’, and the ‘bestialities’ (‘the very words’, he adds in amazed parentheses) of John Locke’s (1632–1704) empiricism, which gave little hope for a British philosophy of aesthetics: ‘I shall hear […] it intimated that it is absurd to expect the science of beauty in a country that values Mathematics only as it helps to make Spinning Jennies & Stocking Weav[in]g machines. […] I shall sigh & say too true!’ (Morley 1929: 118; Robinson 1869: 1: 128). As we have seen, the British periodical press was broadly suspicious of German ‘mysticism’, which ‘it is the fashion in England to

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laugh at’ (Robinson 2010: 58), but Schelling it seems was likewise suspicious towards a great deal of British thinking. And alongside the courses on aesthetics and speculative philosophy, Crabb Robinson attended Schelling’s lectures on methodology in 1803, ‘and I fancied I had a glimpse of light every now and then’ (1869: 1: 165). Crabb Robinson’s ‘chief merit’ as ‘der Englander’ afforded him some local celebrity in Jena, ‘a passport everywhere’ (1869: 1: 131), and he was soon ‘invited to sup with Schelling’. ‘When I paid Schelling the formal Visit which all Students make the Professors & at the same time, his Honorarium’, he presented him with ‘an account of Taylors Translations of Plato, a circumstance highly interest[in]g to him’, referring to the translations by the neoplatonist Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), and ‘related to him many anecdotes of Ben[jamin] Strutt [1754–1827] between whom & the new German Philos[oph]y I have found the most striking Harmony’ (Morley 1929: 119). In the Reminiscences, Crabb Robinson recalls that ‘the evening was a jovial one, and showed that philosophers can unbend as well as other folk’ (1869: 1: 129), but in his private correspondence he was more candid, saying that ‘now I have seen the great Man face to face; what have I to say? That he is not a great Man over the bottle!’ (Morley 1929: 119). Still, the relaxed atmosphere meant that Crabb Robinson ‘ventured to spar with the Professor’, although again, in private he was more honest about his motives for this exchange: under the influence, Schelling ‘has not much colloquial Talent - So little, that unawed by the real admiration I feel for him, I yet ventured to sparr with him & made burlesque applicat[ion]s of his Philos[oph]y’ (Morley 1929: 119). The discussion turned to mythology and the serpent of Genesis, whereupon A Gentleman present had a ring from England in the form of a serpent. ‘What’ s[ai]d S[chelling] to me is the Serpent the Emblem of english Philosophy? O No I ans[were]d; but in England they use it as the Symbol of German Philos[oph]y which changes its coat every year – ‘A proof’ he replied ‘that Englishmen do not look deeper than the coat.’ (Morley 1929: 120; Robinson 1869: 1: 129–130)8

The topic of the merits of British philosophy was taken up again ‘in a private conversation with Schelling’, as described by Crabb Robinson in a letter to his brother: ‘I reproached him with the almost uniform style

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of his censure of our english writers […] He answe’d very handsomely “Because you are more dangerous: The english empiricists are more consistent than the french & are always respectable”’ (2010: 57; 1869: 1: 166). In this sense, Schelling’s more humourous polemics against British thought in his lectures spoke of his respect, and also a sense of fear on his part. For Schelling, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) taken together ‘may be considered the great enemies & Destroyers of Philosophy in modern times’ (2010: 57; 1869: 1: 166). Regardless, however, what is important to note is that dinners at Schelling’s house in Jena were important social occasions during the period, and a number of later British students at Munich and Berlin would also be afforded the privilege of attending events at his homes there. It is through these visitors that we gain some of the most interesting insights into the British reception of Schelling from first-hand accounts, where the topics of conversation often ventured into areas where Schelling rarely published his thoughts. Crabb Robinson began attending the dinners semi-regularly, socialising with a number of the major Schellingeans. There, he must have met Hegel, although he heard him lecture only once (Vigus in Robinson 2010: 16), but in his Reminiscences said that ‘of him I have no recollection, though I find among my papers some memoranda of him’ (1869: 1: 130). Crabb Robinson began to write back to Britain about kritische Philosophie. He had already written a piece on ‘The Origin of the Idea of Cause’, published in the Monthly Magazine in 1799, and in August 1802, a new periodical was launched, The Monthly Register and Encyclopedian Magazine, edited by John Dyer Collier (1762–1825), who Crabb Robinson numbered as a ‘friend’ (1869: 1: 135). The first issue featured the first of a series of pieces on German literature by Crabb Robinson, and he also published in the same periodical a series of three letters on the philosophy of Kant, penned under the byline of ‘an UnderGraduate in the University of Jena’, as well as a translation of an essay on German universities by Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861). But in these pieces, Crabb Robinson did not touch on Schelling, or only peripherally: they focused on Kant, and specifically sought to reply to Beddoes’ conservative approach to kritische Philosophie. The fourth in his series of letters was rejected, however, presumably on the grounds that its subject matter was too specific for a general British audience (Stelzig 2010: 75). The rejection ‘must have been a bitter pill’ (Stelzig 2010: 76), and

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although Crabb Robinson had seemingly planned on writing further essays which may have dealt with Schelling in detail (Vigus in Robinson 2010: 43), these plans were cancelled. While his published work during the period shows him to be more of a Kantian, these plans indicate the ways in which Crabb Robinson’s mind was developing while he was studying in Jena, 1802–1803. For Crabb Robinson, Schelling was ‘at present in the metaphysical Hemisphere’ and he reads him as replying to Kant as offering ‘no Phil[osoph]y but only Criticism’ (2010: 56), through his concept of ‘intellectual intuition’ (intellektuelle Anschauung). He explicates the point in a letter to his brother: I suspect that his [Schelling’s] System is essentially true In certain leading points it is so clear and explanatory And one of these luminous spots in a system of general darkness is the ill famed, ill understood, & mostly unjustly calumniated Pantheism of Spinosa; to which I confess I am strongly inclined[.] (2010: 56–57)

Most importantly, Crabb Robinson felt that Schelling was ‘very much more successful’ than Kant on that key question of the freedom of the will which his formative study of Priestley had made so central to him: ‘I have since found that his Phil[osoph]y is very compatible with necessity I feel myself […] ffor Necessity is still the chain that bends & entangles my faculties in all metaphysical disquisitions’ (2010: 57). From this same period dates a manuscript ‘Über die ffreyheit & Nothwendigkeit’ which shows Crabb Robinson’s ‘inward sympathy’ for Schelling’s thought, and in point of fact anticipates some of the ways in which his thinking on the question of determination would develop in the Freiheitsschrift, as James Vigus has argued (Robinson 2010: 58–59). Still, while Crabb Robinson felt drawn to Schelling during the period, he maintain some scepticism, ‘inclined to think that those who seek with Schelling this absolute Knowledge, are as vain as Semele […] as he is in himself ’ (2010: 58). And his issues with comprehension were not fully resolved: as he admitted in his private correspondences, when Schelling left Jena in 1803, ‘I plagued myself literally with the new Philosophy of Schelling, w[hi]ch I could not then understand’ (Morley 1929: 124). Indeed, it was in part down to his failure to master Schelling that Crabb Robinson gave up his aspirations for a philosophical career of his own.

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Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne While Crabb Robinson was an important early voice in the British reception of Kant, he did not publish any accounts of his time with Schelling during this period. Although he would have discussed Schelling when he returned to Britain with a number of important figures, such as Coleridge, the members of the Wordsworth circle and Carlyle, the most significant role he played in the dissemination of Schelling’s thought in British literary circles during the early years of the nineteenth century came through his encounter with a Frenchwoman: Germaine de Staël. In the Reminiscences, he speaks of her as ‘a lady who then enjoyed a European reputation, and who will have a lasting place in the history of French literature’ (1869: 1: 173). De Staël was already a well known novelist and playwright by the time they met, and she ‘undertook a literary journey into Germany with the purpose of […] studying the new german Philo[oph]y’ (Morley 1929: 133), although the trip was also occasioned by the fact that she had fallen foul of Napoléon Bonaparte and had been exiled from Paris. She travelled with her children and her lover, the political activist Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). Crabb Robinson was approached by Karl August Böttiger (1760–1835), the classicist who was prominent in Jena literary circles during the period: Madame de Staël, from whose lips flow spirit and honeyed speech (Geist und Honigrede), wishes to make your acquaintance, dearest Sir and Friend. She longs for a philosophical conversation with you, and is now busied with the Cahier (notes) on Schellings ‘Æsthetics’, which I possess through your kindness. (1869: 1: 173)9

While she knew Charles de Villers (1765–1815), and through him something of Kant, de Staël needed ‘a guide through the labyrinth of Schelling’ (Stelzig 2010: 85), and with the philosopher himself having left Jena, Crabb Robinson’s multilingualism and keen interest in the new philosophy combined to make him Böttiger’s choice. He was asked ‘to draw up a sketch of Schelling’s “All-Philosophia” […] adapted to the Verstandswelt’ (1869: 1: 173), and met with de Staël on 22 January, although seemingly without discussing Schelling, for Böttiger wrote impatiently ‘is Mme de Staël hoping in vain for some views of the Schellingean Naturphilosophie through your enlightened medium?’ (Stelzig 2010: 82).

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When he did lecture to the French party, Crabb Robinson was not overly impressed with de Staël as a thinker. ‘She has not the least sense for poetry & is absolutely incapable of thinking a philosophical thought’ (Morley 1929: 134), he wrote in private, an insight which was unsurprisingly expurgated from the published Reminiscences. But he did note in this public forum one example of her difficulties: She […] chose as her topic an image which she afterwards in her book quoted with applause, but which, when I first mentioned it to her, she could not comprehend. Schelling, in his ‘Methodology’, calls Architecture ‘frozen music’. This she vehemently abused as absurd, and challenged me to deny that she was right. Forced to say something, I made my escape by a compliment. ‘I can’t deny that you have proved – que votre esprit n’est pas gelé’. (1869: 1: 179; compare 1929: 135)

The allusion is to Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst (SW I.5, 576; HKA II.6; 279; 1989: 165), not his Methode, but it was an idea which de Staël popularised amongst Anglophone readers when she used the phrase in her novel Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807), and it would be influential on Byron and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), amongst others.10 Crabb Robinson adds that ‘there has appeared since in English a treatise on Greek Architecture bearing the significant title, “The Music of the Eye”’ (1869: 1: 179), seeming to suggest that this work (1831) on Vetruvius by Peter Legh, although not displaying evidence of Schelling’s direct influence, found at least a partial and diffuse inspiration in his aesthetics via de Staël. De Staël ordered ‘4 Dissertations on the new Philosophy & paid me for the trouble in loud praise, & promises or threatens me […] with incorporat[in]g them in her great Work’ (Morley 1929: 139). Through de Staël, Crabb Robinson met many of the leading literary figures, and was noted by Constant to Goethe (Morley 1929: 139). Wellek erroneously assumed that Crabb Robinson recycled the material from the Monthly Register for his lectures for de Staël (1931: 154), but Vigus suggests instead that the manuscripts on Kant’s kritische Philosophie (Robinson 2010: 120–124), and those ‘On the Philosophy of Schelling’ (2010: 124–129) and ‘On the German Aesthetick or Philosophy of Taste’ (2010: 129–138), represent the substance of three of these lectures. The latter, delivered on 11 and 19 February 1804, was particularly well received, and generated important discussion. Seemingly as

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a result of this lecture, de Staël was able to astonish Duke Karl August (1757–1828) by explaining Schelling’s aesthetics in detail to him a few days later (Stelzig 2010: 87–88), and indirectly led to Constant’s coining of a new term: ‘l’art pour l’art.’ We will discuss this felicitous coinage again in Chapter 10. De Staël clearly gained a great deal from Crabb Robinson’s analysis, although precisely how much is difficult to estimate with certainty. Her marginalia on the manuscript of the aesthetics lecture showed that Schelling’s discussion of artistic autonomy led her to rethink her characterisation of the protagonist in her novel Delphine (1802),11 but she may also have been more indebted to August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), to whose work she had been introduced by Crabb Robinson, and who became her travelling companion and intellectual guide when she left for Berlin. Regardless, however, it was in some sense through Crabb Robinson’s lectures that Schelling’s name first became a significant part of British Romantic discourse in the pages of de Staël’s book. And Crabb Robinson would play another, more practical part in the publication of the ‘great Work’ when he was called upon in his capacity as a lawyer to help draw up a contract between de Staël and John Murray (1778–1843) (Robinson 1869: 1: 267). The result was De l’Allemagne (1813), published in French and English, translated by Francis Hodgson (1781–1852) and William Lamb (1779–1848), later prime minister, and whose wife, Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828), famously had an affair with Byron. As Wellek argued, De l’Allemagne ‘became in many respects the source of information on Germany’ (1931: 156). In it, de Staël discussed the post-Kantians, differentiating Schelling as someone who ‘has much more knowledge of nature and the fine arts than Fichte, and his lively imagination could not be satisfied with abstract ideas’ (1813: 3: 114). According to de Staël, ‘the system of Kant appeared insufficient to Schelling’ (1813: 3: 115), in phrasing which recalls Crabb Robinson’s analysis in his letter to his brother and his lecture ‘On the Philosophy of Schelling’ (2010: 56, 125), and if ‘Schelling refers everything to nature’, ‘Fichte makes every thing spring from the soul’ (1813: 3: 115). In this, Schelling is akin to Spinoza, ‘but instead of sinking the mind down to the level of matter […], Schelling endeavours to raise matter up to mind’ (1813: 3: 116). But it is not simply in this philosophical difference that the importance of Schelling lies. For de Staël, most significant are Schelling’s ‘ingenious applications’ of his ideas, not simply to the sciences (1813: 3:

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147–148), but to art (1813: 3: 116). It was an emphasis in her presentation of contemporary philosophy which clearly speaks to her source in Crabb Robinson, and marked an early shift in the direction of the British response somewhat away from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and towards aesthetics. Although an anonymous German reader took issue with what they felt to be de Staël’s somewhat too journalistic treatment of Schelling, whose work was deemed to require ‘a profound previous knowledge, without which they cannot be studied with any degree of utility’ (Anon. 1814a: 120), De l’Allemagne was reviewed enthusiastically by the British press, although the sections dealing with Schelling were a little less effusively treated. William Taylor of Norwich, who as we have seen was broadly sympathetic to Kant, commented on ‘the subordinate metaphyscians’ in the course of his review. For Taylor, ‘Schelling teaches aloud his pantheism, and Fichte his atheism, and these isms sound well in the public ears as any other rhime [sic.] to schism’ (1814a: 65). More substantial was James Mackintosh (1765–1832) in his notice in the Edinburgh Review, although he too was also not overly keen on Schelling. While his review was his first published comment on the German, Mackintosh had been reading Schelling with hostility as early as 1805. In a letter to his friend, the politician Richard ‘Conversation’ Sharp (1759–1835) of 1 June, Mackintosh writes: ‘I am still employed in my preparatory reading […]. The German philosophy, under its present leader Schelling, has reached a degree of darkness, in comparison of which Kant was noonday. Kant, indeed, perplexed all Europe; but he is now disdainfully rejected by his countrymen as a superficial and popular writer’ (1835: 1: 250). It is important in this context to note that Mackintosh praises the clarity of de Staël’s treatment of idealism in his review, saying that ‘those who are best acquainted with the philosophical revolutions of Germany will be most astonished at the general correctness of this short, clear, and agreeable exposition’ (1814: 220). This having been said, Mackintosh’s praise is qualified by his misogyny, and he remarks that ‘an account of metaphysical systems by a woman, is a novelty in the history of the human mind’, with these passages of De l’Allemagne ranking as ‘the boldest efforts of the female intellect’ (1814: 220). Others, however, found these same passages less luminous than Mackintosh had done, such as the anonymous reviewer for the British Critic who passes over de Staël’s discussion of Schelling by begging to be ‘excused from attempting to

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expound, in intelligible language, the reveries which these most sapient Germans entitle philosophy’ (Anon. 1814b: 654).

Coincidences: Coleridge and Schelling Through an introduction by Robert Southey (1774–1843), the poet and his brother-in-law, Coleridge visited de Staël in London in October 1813. Monika Class speculates that the British responses to De l’Alle­ magne ‘must have encouraged Coleridge to openly advocate Kant’ (2012: 209), as he would in the Biographia Literaria. Presumably, the same is true of Schelling. Indeed, the date places this meeting within the period when Coleridge was seriously reading Schelling, and certainly, Coleridge may have been encouraged to propound his own philosophical aesthetics given de Staël’s emphasis on this aspect of Schelling’s thought. What more can be said about Coleridge and Schelling? For Paul Hamilton, Schelling was the philosopher who came nearest to Coleridge’s theoretical positing. Existential where Hegel was rational, Schelling felt able to be as philosophically inclusive as the Jena Romantics while claiming that a special philosophical insight licensed his acceptance of the diversity of the world and our different forms of orientation within it. (2007: 26)

Certainly, what we can say within the context of this present study is that Coleridge’s role in the history of Schelling’s British reception cannot be overstated. And while the later nineteenth century would argue in great detail over the precise nature of the ‘coincidences’ and debt owed by the Englishman to the German (discussed in Chapter 4), Coleridge’s status as the most important of Schelling’s British interlocutors is undeniable. He was the most famous Romantic to read Schelling, to be significantly influenced by him, and to write about him in English. Indeed, while plenty of other figures who were hardly minor players in British Romanticism, figures such as Crabb Robinson, Joseph Henry Green, Julius Hare and Thomas de Quincey, were reading Schelling, it remains the case that Coleridge was the only one of the major Romantics to engage with him. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that William Blake read Schelling, although both were obviously highly influenced by Jakob Böhme, and he would be often considered by later

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nineteenth-century commentators as a figure whose own mystical theosophy had many points of comparison with his German contemporary. As for the major second generation Romantics like Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821), they too show no evidence of reading Schelling. While Mary Shelley (1797–1851) records that her husband was translating Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in autumn 1817 (1987: 182), a project which was still ongoing as late as 1821, he did not apparently pick up a copy of the Dutchman’s selfstyled German heir. Likewise, while Keats showed some interest in contemporary German medical texts, he seems to have come independently upon the sentiment which concludes the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820) that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (l. 49), in spite of its uncanny echoing of Schelling’s earlier pronouncement that ‘absolute truth and absolute beauty are one and the same thing’ (SW I.6, 574). The same kind of independence of influence, if confluence of philosophy, is true of William Wordsworth, Coleridge’s one time collaborator and close friend. If Wordsworth knew of Schelling, he probably had not read him first hand, and as E. D. Hirsch argues, he ‘knew too little German to be affected directly by anything written in that language’ (1969: 3). While Wordsworth may have gleaned something from Coleridge, who was reading Kant and German metaphysics at Allan Bank 1809–1810, he professed to Crabb Robinson in a letter of March 1840 that he had ‘never read a word of German metaphysics, thank Heaven’, a comment occasioned by his annoyance over James Frederick Ferrier’s (1808–1864) recent article on Coleridge’s plagiarism (1988: 49). In 1844, the diarist Caroline Fox (1819–1871) recalled Wordsworth opining that ‘Kant, Schelling, Fichte; Fichte, Schelling, Kant: all this dreary work and does not denote progress’ (1882: 2: 40–41), suggesting that while he was aware of German idealism, it did not tempt him. Coleridge, however, was far more than tempted, and for an albeit brief period, culminating in the years of the Biographia Literaria 1815– 1818, he was heavily indebted to Schelling. But when attempting to estimate his significance as a reader of Schelling, we have to understand the question in four different but related senses: firstly, what did Coleridge understand Schelling to mean and why did he think his philosophy was significant? Secondly, what did Coleridge ‘borrow’ from Schelling, and how were these borrowings significant for the development of his own thought? Thirdly, how did he present Schelling to his British readers? And fourthly, to what extent did reading Coleridge help to develop

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Schelling’s own ideas and thoughts? These are questions that we will by necessity have to return to in later chapters, but some initial comments are in order here. Precisely dating the beginnings of Coleridge’s serious interest in Schelling is difficult (1998: 344). He had travelled to Göttingen in 1799, and he first began reading Kant around this period, so it seems likely he would have known of Schelling from this point onwards, but when he began reading Schelling himself is less clear. The earliest allusion to Schelling in the notebooks dates to 1808 (1973: #3276) and Coleridge was certainly conversing with some authority (or pretended authority) on Schelling as early as 1810, on the evidence of Crabb Robinson’s diaries (1869: 1: 304–305, 380–381). By 1812, Coleridge had begun to rehearse the line that ‘all Schelling has said, Coleridge has either thought himself, or found in Jacob Boehme’ (Robinson 1869: 1: 388), in terms which anticipate his defence of his ‘coincidences’ with Schelling in the Biographia five years later. In that work, written in 1815, he shows knowledge of a large number of Schelling’s texts: the works included in the Philosophische Schriften (including the Vom Ich, the Philosophische Briefe, the Akademierede and the Freiheitsschrift), but also the System, Abhandlungen, Ideen, Darlegung and Philosophie und Religion. He likely owned the Schriften before or by early 1812, as he had told Crabb Robinson in August of that year that Schelling ‘appears greatest in his last work on Freiheit’ (1869: 1: 107–108). We also know that he borrowed Crabb Robinson’s copy of the Methode in November of the following year, ‘for I have a plan maturing, to w[hich] that work would be serv[iceable]’ (1959a: 461), although it is something of a curiosity that, as far as we can tell, Coleridge did not borrow Crabb Robinson’s notes from his attendenance at Schelling’s lectures on aesthetics in Jena (Vigus in Robinson 2010: 65). Showing his continuing interest, in August 1816, Coleridge bought the Denkmal from Thomas Boosey, his bookseller, and sought to purchase ‘all the works of Schelling, with exception of those, I already possess’ (1959b: 665).12 There is a kind of bounding enthusiasm displayed here in Coleridge’s remarkable consumption of the texts of both Schelling and other figures engaging with similar questions during the period. Indeed, for Hamilton, this kind of consumption displays ‘the eroticism of Coleridge’s philosophical engagements […], the sheer overwhelming pleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealism’ (2007: 2). We have already seen such an eroticism at work in the

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Urszene of Schelling’s reception in the pages of Coleridge’s Biographia, although there the pleasure is tainted with the traces of the death-drive. Hamilton’s idea is perhaps more affirmative, however, and it is a useful way of thinking about the relationship that Coleridge had during these years with Schelling: a kind of energetic jouissance experienced through reading his German forebear. Grappling with Schelling, as he admitted in his marginal comments, could make Coleridge ‘giddy’ (1998: 365). How, then, did Coleridge approach Schelling? If one takes the evidence presented in the Biographia Literaria at face value, Coleridge claims that he first read Kant and then came upon Schelling, without having spent a great deal of time on Fichte. But the evidence of Coleridge’s letters and marginalia tell a very different tale. Coleridge had begun reading Fichte many years before Schelling, and in detail; likely at about the same time as he started reading Kant, so around 1798–1799 when in Germany, or shortly after his return to Britain (1984b: 594). His interest in Fichte was serious, and more serious than the perfunctory allusion to his name in Biographia Literaria would have led his readers to have believed. He annotated some eight texts by Fichte (as many titles as by Schelling), but importantly, his response to Fichte does not seem to have been as positive as his response to Schelling. Coleridge took seriously Fichte’s attempt to break out of Kant’s closed system, but found his approach ultimately underwhelming. He takes issue both with Fichte’s theory of the Tathandlung, the initial ‘act’ by which the consciousness posits itself as such, and with the ways in which Fichte characterised this consciousness as an essentially, almost exclusively, ‘rational’ operation. In a marginal note to his copy of Die Bestimmung des Menschen [The Vocation of Man] (1800), dating to around 1815, Coleridge accuses Fichte of plunging into ‘deceiving ψευδοσοφγ [psuedosophy]’ and his philosophy of amounting to little more than ‘a Juggler’s Trick of dividing his Individuality into the knowing and the acting […] man’ (1984b: 614). Of course, he could accuse Schelling of a similar feat, at least in private, as his marginalia to the Darlegung and Denkmal demonstrate (1998: 355, 362, 364), but Fichte was guilty of different kinds of liberties, Coleridge thought. His was ‘the maddest Bellow of Bull-frog Hyperstoicism, I ever met with under the name of Philosophy’ (1998: 352), Coleridge noted, and he came to think of Fichte in terms corrected through Schelling. Thus, in a marginal note to Fichte’s Grundlage, dating to around 1815, Coleridge writes: ‘Is not a portion of the obscurity of the Wissenschaftslehre attributable to the

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choice of “Ich” instead of Soul of Spirit?’ With the “I” we habitually connect the presence of Potence or Consciousness[.]’ (1984b: 625). The ‘we’ is Coleridge, but it is Coleridge writing with Schelling, identifying with him, almost as his uncanny doppelgänger. Around the late summer 1818, Coleridge even jotted down in his notebook, ‘S.T.C. = Schelling’ (1973: #4428).13 During this period, Coleridge was most impressed by the ways in which Schelling’s metaphysics, Naturphilosophie and aesthetics came together to help him understand better the relationship between the individual consciousness, the wider world in which this consciousness found themselves, and the place of the artist in this world. But his enthusiasm was not life-long. Shortly after the publication of the Biographia, he began to have more serious misgivings. In his collaborative work with Green, Coleridge came to discern issues with Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and his religious temperament came to find Schelling’s pantheism had not quite side-stepped the problem of atheism in the way in which the German philosopher imagined (discussed in more detail in Chapters 7 and 8). For Coleridge, Schelling’s contention that God grounds himself in an unconscious Ungrund leaves ‘all hanging in frivolous & idle sort. Schwebend’ (1989: #4666), and as Hamilton has rightly noted, ‘Coleridge’s hostility to Schelling grows in proportion to the closeness with which his thought glosses Coleridge’s own fundamental religious orientation’ (2007: 15). We shall see in Chapter 7 the ways in which Coleridge broke with Schelling on theological grounds. But the distaste also began to become personal, as Coleridge’s marginalia to Schelling’s Denkmal makes apparent.14 Summing up his opinions on page two of his copy, Coleridge writes: In addition to the harsh quarrelsome and vindictive Spirit that displays itself in this Denkmal, there is a Jesuitical dishonesty in various parts that makes me almost dread to think of Schelling. I remember no man of anything like his Genius & intellectual Vigor so serpentine and unamiable. […] it is so steeped in Gall, as to repel one from it – […] and the Wit, the Would-be-Smile, sardonic throughout. Dry Humor with a vengeance! (1998: 360)

The association of Schelling with Catholicism was an erroneous one on Coleridge’s part, but it was a common one, as we shall see in Chapter 7. And it was one which he discussed in his lecture at the Crown and

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Anchor Tavern in London, 22 March 1819, ostensibly on the topic of ‘German philosophy as a response to Locke’. In advertisements for the lecture, it was promised that Coleridge would lecture explicitly on Schelling, but in point of fact he did not: ‘My time will not permit me to enter into any account of [Schelling] as I intended, but in truth I should be puzzled to give you a true account’ (2000: 2: 588). In his short comments, Coleridge instead links Schelling vaguely to Kant, Spinoza, Plotinus and Proclus, and to ‘the writings of a Jesuit who opposed the Protestants I think about the time of James I but got silenced for it’ (2000: 2: 588–589), an allusion to Thomas White (1593–1676) as he made clear in a later letter (1959b: 883). Coleridge relays the gossip that Schelling had become a ‘Roman Catholic pantheist’ (2000: 2: 589), before quoting from the report of one of Schelling’s disciples who he had met in Rome (590–591). If any of Coleridge’s audience had come to hear about Schelling’s philosophy or its significance in terms of the wider narrative of the history of philosophy as Coleridge understood it, they would have been sorely disappointed by this promised lecture. The entire digression amounted to nothing more than the reporting of speculation and rumour. Indeed, while Coleridge suggested that his ‘Logosophia’, the unfinished Magnum Opus, might offer the last word on his interpretation of Schelling (1984: 1: 164), in point of fact, the surviving pages of the Opus Maximus show surprisingly little direct engagement with Schelling. Written in later years, Coleridge had by then seemingly fallen out of love with Schelling. Still, what is clear is that even a casual reader of the Biographia Literaria, picking it up broadly uniformed regarding German literature, would have immediately sensed Coleridge’s esteem for Schelling. Likewise, those readers would have gained a pretty solid grasp of some of Schelling’s basic aesthetic philosophies as they were ‘ventriloquised’ by Coleridge, most notably the famous theory of the imagination: The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at

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all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (1984a: 304)

The distinction between the primary and secondary imagination mimes Schelling’s distinction between ‘der produktiven Anschauung’ [productive intuition] and ‘das Dichtungsvermögen’ [poetic faculty] in the System (SW I.3, 626; HKA I.9, 326; 1978: 230), as does the emphasis on aesthetic ‘re-creation’.15 For Coleridge, as for Schelling, the distinction links metaphysics and aesthetics: the primary imagination is the divine act through which the consciousness creates the world, and the secondary imagination is its mimesis in the aesthetic intuition whereby the artist re-creates the world unconsciously. The imagination is, as Coleridge puts it three chapters beforehand, the ‘Esemplastic’ power. He disingenuously comments that ‘the word is not in Johnson, nor have I met it elsewhere’, claiming that he had ‘constructed it myself from the Greek words, εἰς ἓν πλάτειν i.e. to shape into one’ (1984a: 1: 168), when in fact he had taken the idea from Schelling’s Darlegung (SW I.7, 60), as Ferrier later pointed out (1840: 294). But the Anglicised term is instructive, since it serves to sum up the ways in which Schelling’s thought was presented to British readers via Coleridge. Some of the central tenets of Coleridge’s aesthetic philosophy during this period developed out of his engagement with Schelling, although they were often presented as being his own rather than as being the German’s. Indeed, Coleridge’s interest in Schelling’s aesthetics was maintained, even as he began to become less enamoured with his metaphysics and theology in the following years in the wake of the publication of the Biographia. The notes for his lecture ‘On Poesy or Art’ (1987: 2: 213–225), first delivered 10 March 1818 in the Great Room of the London Philosophical Society, shows a heavy reliance on the Akademierede. Although it is unclear to what extent Coleridge deviated from or embellished upon Schelling’s ideas when he delivered his paper, there seems a solid chance on the basis of what we know of Coleridge’s tendency to identify with Schelling, that the substance was given as being Coleridge’s own. Likewise, Coleridge’s manuscript notes of his contributions to Green’s lectures on aesthetics, which the latter delivered at the Royal Academy from 1825 onwards, also show the keen influence of the Akademierede (1995: 1308–1322). In 1843, some years after Coleridge’s death, Green would publish edited versions of these lectures, including material seemingly written by Coleridge and derived from Schelling, in

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two articles in The Athenæum (1843a, b). The German philosopher’s name, however, was absent. The question of the ways in which Coleridge developed Schelling’s ideas must be left until later chapters. But what has emerged in the course of this chapter is the already complicated ways in which the British began to become aware of Schelling. In the periodicals and reviews, readers could have gained an understanding of some of the contours of his philosophy, its significance to various disciplines, including science and medicine, and some sense of the politics of the climate of post-Kantian Jena. And in the years that followed, we see that perhaps Schelling’s two most significant Romantic respondents in the figures of Crabb Robinson and Coleridge engaged with his philosophy in a displaced manner. Crabb Robinson did not publish his opinions of Schelling during the period, and instead his view of the philosopher would only be disseminated either through the personal interactions he had within the different intellectual networks he circulated, or through the work of de Staël. Similarly, although Coleridge constitutes the most significant figure for galvanising Romantic interest in, and attention to, Schelling, both in person and in print, he was perhaps even more influential in spreading Schelling’s theories when ventriloquized through his own voice. ‘What may not an ingenious man make out against another, if he will put his own definitions on the other’s words?’ he complained of Schelling in the Denkmal (1998: 371), but Coleridge himself certainly knew a thing or two about speaking in the words of another.

Notes

1. On this point, see Class (2012). 2. For the attribution of authorship to Geddes, see Nangle (1955: 233). 3.  I discuss the Edinburgh Review in more detail in Chapter 3. On the Monthly Review, see Roper (1978), and on its role in the reception of German literature in particular, see Chandler (1997) and Micheli (1990). 4. For the attributions of authorship, see Nangle (1955: 235, 237). The manuscript for the 1805 review was apparently signed ‘But.’, and Benjamin Nangle gives Charles Butler, although this does not seem to tally with his areas of speciality, and it may instead have been by George Butler (1774–1853), later Master of Harrow, who was also an active reviewer during the period.

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5. Ontyd’s diffuse influence, and thereby, by extension, the diffuse influence of Schelling, would be felt many years later. Ontyd was cited in the third edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s (1752–1840) Institutiones physiologicae (1810) (1817: 367, 370), translated into English in 1813 by John Elliotson (1791–1868). While Blumenbach’s ideas differed from both Ontyd’s and Schelling’s, the work was influential on both Coleridge and John Keats. Elliotson himself would later be William Makepeace Thackeray’s (1811–1863) personal physician, and his theories of animal magnetism influenced the novelists Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) in the late 1860s. 6. The piece appeared anonymously. It is tempting to speculate that the author might have been Crabb Robinson, who was then a student in Jena and had previously published in the Monthly Magazine, but we have no evidence for this. 7. Generally, I quote from Crabb Robinson’s letters in Morley 1929, which tend to be more detailed, maintaining his erratic punctuation and capitalisation, but I also give references to the relevant parts of the texts of his Reminiscences for comparison, and occasionally discuss the differences between these two versions: the Reminiscences were published in 1869 and thus are a document that themselves played a part in the history of Schelling’s later nineteenth century reception. 8. Crabb Robinson’s quip seems to have been accurate as well as witty; or perhaps Coleridge heard this anecdote from Crabb Robinson when the latter returned to Britain and they became friendly. In a marginal note to Schelling’s Denkmal, dating to around 1816–1817, he wrote: ‘Schelling alter[s] his faith year[ly] as Serpents cast their skins[.]’ (1998: 368). 9. These notes are transcribed by Vigus in Robinson (2010: 64–119), who notes the ‘astonishingly’ close correspondence between Crabb Robinson notes of the Jena lectures on aesthetics and the version which was eventually published, taken from Schelling’s lectures in Würtzburg, 1804–1805 (SW I.5, 353–736). 10. See Byron (1839: 202) and Emerson (1964: 40, 75, 337–338). 11. The marginalia is reproduced by Vigus in Robinson (2010: 130). 12. In a later letter of September, he also asks Boosey for ‘any answer (if such a thing be) of Fichte to Schelling’s Darstellung der Verhältness &c, or of Jacobi to Schelling’s Denkmal’ (1959b: 668). 13. Indeed, not only did Coleridge think of himself as a sort of Schelling, but he read Schelling’s philosophy as necessarily splitting the philosophical subject. As he writes in his marginalia to the System, ‘Schelling finds the necessity of splitting not alone Philosophy but the Philosopher - a sort of Kehama twy personal at two several gates’ (1998: 461), referring to Southey’s poem, Curse of Kehama (1810).

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14. Berkeley convincingly frames the hostility in this marginalia within the context of Coleridge’s interest in the contours of the pantheism controversy (2007: 108–142). 15.  For an introductory analysis on these borrowings, see Orsini (1969: 222–237).

Works Cited Anon. 1794. Review of Paulus’s Memorabilien. British Critic (August): 208. ———. 1800a. Review of Schelling’s Ideen. The Medical and Physical Journal 3 (14) (April): 384–386. ———. 1800b. Foreign Literature. New Annual Register 15: 337–364. ———. 1802a. Literary Notices. The Scots Magazine 44 (March): 252–254. ———.1802b. Half-Yearly Retrospect of German Literature. Monthly Magazine 12: 590–610. ———. 1802c. Account of the University of Jena. Monthly Magazine 13: 433–434. ———. 1803a. Retrospect of German Literature. Monthly Magazine 14: 646–654. ———. 1803b. Retrospect of German Literature. Monthly Magazine 15: 667–668. ———. 1804a. Half-Yearly Retrospect of German Literature. Monthly Magazine 17: 669–691. ———. 1804b. Notices Reflecting Men of Letters. Universal Magazine 1: 170–173. ———. 1805a. Half-Yearly Retrospect of German Literature. Monthly Magazine 18: 622–645. ———. 1805b. Varieties, Literary and Philosophical. Monthly Magazine 20: 255–262. ———. 1808. The Inquirer. No. XII. On the Present State of Medical Science in Germany. Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 4 (January): 69–73. ———. 1814a. A Critical Analysis of Madame de Staël’s Work on Germany, by a German. London: Samuel Leigh. ———. 1814b. Review of de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. British Critic [n.s.] 2: 639–659. Beddoes, Thomas. 1796. Kant: Zum Ewigen Frieden. Monthly Review 20: 486–490. Berkeley, Richard. 2007. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. 1817. The Institutions of Physiology, trans. John Elliotson, 2nd ed. London: Longman et al.

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Butler, Charles[?]. 1805. Review of Meusel’s History of Literature. Monthly Review 46: 488–496. Byron, George Gordon. 1839. Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore. London: John Murray. Class, Monika. 2012. Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817. London: Bloomsbury. Chandler, David. 1997. The Foundation of “Philosophical Criticism”: William Taylor’s Connection with the Monthly Review, 1792–93. Studies in Bibliography 50: 359–371. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1959a. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume III, 1807–1814, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1959b. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume IV, 1815–1819, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1973. Notebooks III, 1808–1819, ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1984a. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1984b. Marginalia II. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 12, ed. George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1987. Lectures 1808–1819, On Literature. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 5, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1989. Notebooks IV, 1819–1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. Marginalia IV. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 12, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000. Lectures 1818–1819, On the History of Philosophy. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 8, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Staël, Germaine. 1813. Germany, trans. Francis Hodgson and William Lamb, 3 vols. London: John Murray. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1964. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume IV 1832–34, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ferrier, James Frederick. 1840. The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge. Blackwood’s Magazine 47: 287–299. Fox, Caroline. 1882. Memories of Old Friends, ed. H.N. Pym, 2 vols, 2nd ed. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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Geddes, Alexander. 1798. Review of Pott’s Commentatio. Monthly Review 26: 498. Green, J.H. 1843a. On Beauty and Expression as Elements of the Fine Arts. The Athenæum 842: 1108–1111. ———. 1843b. The Conditions of Beauty in the Beautiful Object. The Athenæum 843: 1134–1137. Hamilton, Paul. 2007. Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic. London: Continuum. Hirsch, E.D. 1969. Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Legh, Peter. 1831. The Music of the Eye. London: William Walker. Mackintosh, James. 1814. Review of de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. Edinburgh Review 22: 198–238. ———. 1835. Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honorable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert Mackintosh, 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon. Micheli, G. 1990. The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England 1785– 1805. In Kant and His Influence, ed. G.M. Ross and T. McWalter. Bristol: Thoemmes. Morley, Edith J. 1929. Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800–1805. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1935. The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson. London: J.M. Dent. Nangle, Benjamin. 1955. The Monthly Review, Second Series, 1790–1815. Oxford: Clarendon. Ontyd, C.G. 1802. Inquiry into the Influence of Chemistry on the Operation of Animal Bodies. The Medical and Physical Journal 7 (39) (May): 460–467. Orsini, Gian N.G. 1969. Coleridge and German Idealism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1799. The Origin of the Idea of Cause. Monthly Magazine 7: 375–378. ———. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London: Macmillan. ———. 2010. Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus. London: MHRA. Roper, Derek. 1978. Reviewing Before the Edinburgh 1788–1802. London: Methuen. Schelling, F.W.J. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Schwabe, C.E. 1810. Review of Ancillon’s Mélanges de Littérature. Monthly Review 61: 504–510. Schweighäuser, Johann Gottfried. 1804. On the Present State of Philosophy in Germany. Monthly Magazine 18: 205–208. Shaffer, Elinor. 1975. ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelley, Mary. 1989. The Journals of Mary Shelley, Volume I: 1814–1822, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon. Stelzig, Eugene. 2010. Henry Crabb Robinson in Germany. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Taylor, William. 1797. Kant: Project on Perpetual Peace. Monthly Review 22: 114–115. ———. 1798. Kant: Observation sur le Sentiment du Beau and du Sublime. Monthly Review 25: 584–585. ———. 1799. Elements of Critical Philosophy. Monthly Review 28: 62–69. ———. 1814. Review of de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. Monthly Review 73: 63–68. van Woudenberg, Maximiliaan. 2018. Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism 1794–1804: The Legacy of Göttingen University. London: Routledge. Wellek, René. 1931. Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1988. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part IV, 1840–1853, ed. Alan G. Hill, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon.

CHAPTER 3

Schelling’s Reception in Scotland, 1817–1833

The years following the publication of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria saw a battle fought over the reception of Romanticism and the place of German philosophy within British literature. When even a figure such as William Hazlitt (1778–1830) attacked Coleridge’s book as being suspended between ‘poetic levity and metaphysical bathos’, and its author as someone playing at hawk and buzzard between sense and nonsense, – floating or sinking in fine Kantean categories, in a state of suspended animation ’twixt dreaming and awake, [and] quitting the plain ground of ‘history and particular facts’ for the first butterfly theory, fancy-bred from the maggots of his brain. (1817: 491)

then it was clear that Coleridge’s use of Schelling and other German thinkers was not a decision that would be universally appreciated.1 But perhaps most interestingly for our purposes, Hazlitt’s review of the Biographia Literaria was published in Scotland in the pages of the Edinburgh Review. In this context, it may be a little surprising to consider the fact that the central locus of Schelling’s British reception in the late 1820s and early 1830s was not to be found in Bristol, the Lake District or London, but north of the border, through the figure of William Hamilton and his followers. On the one hand, the fact that Scotland should find itself receptive to Schelling may seem curious. During the previous century, © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_3

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Scotland had become the seat of the ‘common sense school’, as it came to be known after the publication of The Scottish School (1875) by James McCosh (1811–1894), Hamilton’s former pupil and later president of Princeton (1868–1888). Built on the foundations of the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy of Thomas Reid (1710–1796), reacting in large measure to John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776), the Scottish school based its conclusions on a realist theory of perception, pitting the testimony of common sense against logical abstractions. While Scottish literature proved receptive, if not always unconditionally welcoming, to Romanticism during the early 1800s, its philosophy maintained a bias towards common sense realism. The most significant philosophical voice during these years was that of Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). The natural heir to Reid, Stewart ascended to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1785, one of the two most important academic posts in Scotland. Stewart developed a continental reputation, attracting students including philosopher Thomas Brown (1778–1820), economist James Mill (1806–1873), politicians James Mackintosh and Henry John Temple (Lord Palmerston) (1784–1865), and Walter Scott (1771–1832). But while Stewart engaged with French thought, particularly that of Étienne Condillac (1714–1780), he admitted that he found Kant incomprehensible, freely professing his ‘ignorance of German’ in the second part of his Dissertation (1821), a survey of the history of philosophy composed for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1854: 1: 389 n).2 It was there that Stewart ventures his only significant comment on Schelling, directed by de Staël and French criticism, particularly that of Joseph Marie de Gérando (1772–1842), who he met in 1788: In Germany, at present, we are told, that a pure Kantian is scarcely to be found. But there are many Semi-Kantians and Anti-Kantians, as well as partisans of other schemes built out of the ruins of the Kantian philosophy [of which] those of Fichte and Schelling seem to have attracted among their countrymen the greatest number of proselytes. Of neither am I able to speak from my own knowledge. (1855: 1: 418)3

‘We are told’ is a telling subordinate clause, and in what follows, Fichte receives three muddled paragraphs, offering entirely contradictory understandings of his position, before a solitary paragraph on ‘the system of Schelling’, which is reduced to ‘an extension of that

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of Fichte; connecting with it a sort of Spinozism grafted on Idealism’ (1854: 1: 419). This bizarrely unwieldy image was one translated directly from de Gérando (‘une sorte de Spinosism enté sur l’ldealisme’ [1804: 2: 332]), but constitutes more caricature than criticism. And in what follows, Stewart misrepresented Schelling entirely: ‘In considering the primitive ego as the source of all reality as well as of all science, and in thus transporting the mind into an intellectual region, inaccessible to men possessed only of the ordinary number of senses, both [Schelling and Fichte] agree’ (1854: 1: 419). Very few pages of Schelling merit such an estimation, perhaps only those of 1795, and by the time of Identitätsphilosophie, his break from Fichte was manifest. Whether Stewart was unwilling or unable to follow de Gérando, whose appreciation shows a little more nuance, is unclear, but what is certain is that he did not accurately represent to his audience anything other than Schelling’s earliest philosophy, and that only partially, dismissing it as ‘transcendental mysticism’.

‘The Veil of Isis’: Sir William Hamilton In 1829, the publication of a review of Victor Cousin’s Cours de philosophie (1828) in the Edinburgh Review changed things. The anonymous reviewer was Sir William Hamilton, then relatively unknown. After studying at Oxford, Hamilton settled in Edinburgh. He was already noted as a formidable philosopher, with John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), his close friend (today remembered best for his seven volume biography of his father-in-law, The Life of Walter Scott [1837–1838]), writing in 1810 that Hamilton ‘took up more of Aristotle than was ever done, or is likely to be done again’ at Oxford (Veitch 1864: 38). Hamilton’s interest in idealism dates from around 1817 when he began to learn German, and the two, language and philosophy, went hand-in-hand, as an unpublished manuscript on ‘Theoretische Philosophie’, dating from September 1817, demonstrates.4 Earlier that same year, Hamilton first visited Germany, travelling to Leipzig with Lockhart, where he met Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann (1772–1848), the classical philologist whose work on mythology influenced Schelling’s later thought (Veitch 1864: 89–90).5 In 1820, he returned, visiting Hamburg, Berlin, Wittenberg and Dresden. The surviving manuscripts from this period suggest that Hamilton not only spent his time in the libraries, but also listening to lectures, presumably in Berlin.6 In the early 1820s, Hamilton was one

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of the founding members of a club for disseminating German periodicals, alongside Robert Pearce Gillies (1788–1858)7; Andrew Duncan (1744–1828), five-time president of the Royal Medical Society and Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh; Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), distinguished scientist and historian; John Campbell Colquhoun (1803–1870), politician; and a ‘Professor Jamieson’, which I take to be a misspelling on John Veitch’s (1829–1894) part for Robert Jameson (1774–1854), Professor of Natural History and tutor to a young Charles Darwin.8 The latter name is particularly suggestive, for Schelling was a member of the Wernerian Natural History Society, an offshoot of the Royal Society of Edinburgh established in 1808, named after the geologist Abraham Gottleib Werner (1749–1817) and established by Jameson (Anon. 1811: xxi). Regardless, all of the figures in Hamilton’s network may well have been reading Schelling with him. He also began to make contacts in the German academic world, recommending the philologist Georg Friedrich Benecke (1762–1844), then librarian at Göttingen, for a vacant position at the Advocates Library (Veitch 1864: 93–95). On the death of Thomas Brown in 1820, Hamilton was considered a candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh despite the fact that he had yet to publish anything. His competitor was John Wilson (1785–1854), who, unlike Hamilton, was an established writer, although not a widely read philosopher. The appointment was political, resting on Edinburgh Town Council. Initially underwhelmed by the two candidates, they offered the position to Mackintosh, who declined in order to stay in London (Cockburn 1856: 370). To strengthen his case, Hamilton sought the support of Stewart, who initially favoured Macvey Napier (1776–1847), but gave his voice to Hamilton when Napier withdrew, and he also secured the vote of Lord Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850); however, Hamilton was a Whig, and the Tory Council voted in favour of Wilson. This incident is more than simply a matter of curiosity, for the question of Scottish politics is key to the narrative of Schelling’s reception. Wilson, Jeffrey and Napier were all journalists. Indeed, it had been in Jeffrey’s flat that Sydney Smith (1771–1845) had first come up with the idea for the Edinburgh Review. First published on 10 October 1802, Smith edited the initial number, and was succeeded by Jeffrey. Broadly speaking, the Review promoted Romanticism and Whig politics, although it also carried some strong criticism of Romantic authors, as evidenced by Hazlitt’s review, emphasising editorial and contributor

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independence.9 Its primary rival was the London Quarterly Review, published by John Murray (1778–1843) and a vehicle for Tory politics, but as of 1817 the role of antagonist was taken by William Blackwood’s (1776–1834) new Blackwood’s Magazine. Conceived from its outset as direct competition to the Review, both commercially and politically, Blackwood’s, with its lead writer ‘Christopher North’, Wilson’s pseudonym, positioned itself as a more politically radical voice of Toryism. These were charged times, not least for the friendship between Hamilton and Lockhart. The former was a Whig, if mild and unobtrusive in his politics, while the latter was a Tory, and Lockhart began to write for Blackwood’s. In this capacity he openly attacked the Edinburgh Review, most notably in works such as his Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819), parodying Scott, and the imaginary dialogues ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ (1822–1835), written with Wilson, James Hogg (1770–1835) and others; indeed, John Veitch (1829–1894) claimed that politics cost the men their friendship (1864: 90–91). Incipit Macvey Napier. Another student of Stewart’s, Napier had been writing articles for the Review since 1805, and in 1818 he engaged in a public spat with Wilson.10 He was the natural successor to the editorship and when Jeffrey stepped down in order to smooth the way for his election as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Napier took on the mantle.11 Keen to make a statement with his first number, Napier contacted Hamilton and asked for a contribution; in spite of the author’s apparent reluctance (Hamilton 1852: 1n), the result was his influential essay on ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’ which secured his reputation.12 The significance of this article, and the two which followed it (‘The Philosophy of Perception’ and ‘Logic’),13 on British philosophy during the mid-century cannot be overstated. Initially, the response was one of ‘astonished bewilderment’ (Veitch 1882: 26); as Hamilton himself recalled, the essay was ‘not understood [in Britain], and naturally, for a season, declared incomprehensible’ (1852: 2n, 1n). Jeffrey, oblivious that the author was Hamilton, wrote to his successor that the essay was ‘beyond all doubt, the most unreadable thing that ever appeared in the Review. The only chance is, that gentle readers may take it to be very profound’ (1879: 70). Napier, for his part, confessed in 1836 to experiencing ‘a sort of selfish joy’ in the response to the article (Veitch 1864: 147). Hamilton’s work was ahead of its time in Britain at least, but before long the rest of the country began to catch up and the article was reappraised. By 1865, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), whose father

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James had been Stewart’s pupil, and who was then the premier force in British philosophy, felt it necessary to devote an entire work to An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). For McCosh, Hamilton was ‘the most learned of all the Scottish metaphysicians’ (1875: 384), and a work on Hamilton by Veitch would be published in 1882 as one of only fifteen titles in Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics series (1880–1890). ‘If we except the earnest and impassioned but fragmentary utterances of Coleridge’, Veitch remarks, then the essay on ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’ constituted ‘the first indication that any one in Britain had become aware of the true import of the highest philosophical thought of the century’ (1864: 147). Veitch is overstating the case, as we have seen, but the article certainly made a substantial public impression, and was quickly revered abroad. Victor Cousin, its ostensible subject, was impressed, for he ‘did not believe that there was an individual beyond the Channel capable of interesting himself so deeply in metaphysics’ (Veitch 1864: 150). Cousin felt the article ‘an excellent augury for philosophy in England’, and in a letter to Sarah Austin (1793–1867), who he had met in Bonn in 1827 (presumably through their mutual friend Christian August Brandis [1790–1867]), he enquired about the author (Veitch 1864: 150).14 Austin was one of Schelling’s English translators in her Fragments from German Prose Writers (1841), and we will discuss her again in Chapter 6. Discovering the author’s name, Cousin began a correspondence with Hamilton to last a decade, and he would write a letter of support for his application to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics, which Hamilton secured in 1836. While Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire (1805–1895), Cousin’s friend and disciple, deemed Hamilton’s critique ‘très sévère’ (1895: 1: 299), Cousin himself was deeply impressed and discussed it in his second edition of his Fragments philosophiques (1833: xlii). Hamilton’s continental reputation was thereby secured, and the article and others would be translated into French by Louis Peisse (1803–1880), also Stewart’s translator, in 1840. If the ostensible subject of the review is Cousin, the article is notable also for its substantial engagement with Schelling, covering eight pages. Wellek credits Hamilton as the first Scot to possess a solid comprehension of Kant (1831: 62); more significant is the way in which his approach towards Kant was determined teleologically through Schelling. Hamilton was widely read and spoke with authority, having collected German philosophical literature from around 1820. By the time of his death, his library

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as a whole numbered close to ten thousand volumes,15 and while we cannot know when each book made its way into the collection, Hamilton owned at least the De Marcione, both the 1797 and 1803 editions of Ideen, a copy of the Denkmal, and an 1830 edition of the Methode. In his writings, Hamilton also shows that he had read the Bruno and the 1809 Philosophische Schriften, as well as Schelling’s contributions to Fichte and Niethammer’s Philosophische Journal (1795–1800).16 Of these works, it is no doubt the essays Vom Ich and Philosophische Briefe that prove the most significant to Hamilton’s reading of Schelling. Throughout his career, Hamilton returns to Schelling consistently, if in a less concentrated fashion, as the four volumes of the posthumously collected Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1860) demonstrate.17 But Hamilton’s major contribution to the narrative of Schelling’s reception rests on this article on ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’. He understands by the latter term any concept which purports to remain unconditioned by material, spatial or temporal boundaries, including both the concept of the ‘infinite’, the unconditionally unlimited, and the ‘absolute’, the unconditionally limited (1852: 12). Kant’s first Kritik, in part responding to the tradition of Scottish philosophy which Hamilton had inherited, is the focus.18 For Hamilton, Kant’s critical cul-de-sac ‘leads to absolute scepticism’ (1852: 18), since the Ding-ansich remained ‘beyond the verge of our knowledge’ (1852: 16): Kant had annihilated the older metaphysic, [but] the germ of a more visionary doctrine of the Absolute […] was contained in the bosom of his own philosophy. He had slain the body, but had not exorcised the spectre, of the Absolute; and this spectre has continued to haunt the schools of Germany even to the present day. (1852: 18)

Hamilton singles out Schelling as the most significant Kantian apparition, an uncanny ‘spectre’, who had refused to give up on the Absolute, his novelty resting in admitting that the unconditioned was unknowable to the subject. Hamilton’s position is slightly ambiguous here: he credits Schelling with making significant philosophical advances, but deems his pursuit of the unconditioned fundamentally erroneous. Schelling is therefore introduced to the British reader as significant, his philosophy of considerable ‘merit’, even if this merit be only ‘negative’ (1852: 20). For Hamilton, Schelling’s ‘merit’ comes down to his version of Intellektuelle Anschauung, a key moment in the narrative of his British

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reception, marking the first published analysis of the concept explicitly linked to Schelling by name to appear in the English language. In the Biographia, for instance, Coleridge had only discussed the intuition as it appears in Kant, focusing on the De mundi sensibilis (1770). While most critics assume that Coleridge’s criticisms of Kant’s denial of the possibility of intellectual intuitions, for which he saw ‘no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term’ (1984: 1: 289), implied Schelling,19 he had not been named by Coleridge in this context. As such, while Hamilton’s reading is partial and in places untenable, limited mainly to discussing Schelling’s early attempts at thinking through the Kantian legacy, he is foundational to any account of the narrative of Schelling’s reception insofar as he recognises, explains and popularises to his British readers the idea of Schelling’s Anschauung. Hamilton variously translates this term as ‘Intellectual Vision’ (1852: 6) and ‘Intellectual Intuition’ (1852: 20). The difficulty in English translation is in part down to Hamilton’s issue with the original German term, and he emphasises the distinction between Vernuft and Verstand (1852: 6n.).20 Hamilton’s somewhat eccentric choice of ‘vision’ suggests a link to the ancient Greek category of θεωρία, and another equation of Schelling with ‘mysticism’ (1852: 32); for him, Schelling’s ‘act’ of Anschauung is ‘ineffable’ (1852: 20), a kind of poetic insight, and he quotes Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) on ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ of the Poet (2007: 51).21 Hamilton’s argument relies on the Philosophische Briefe, quoted on the simile of intuition as an awakening from death. This contrasts with the conscious ‘act’ of intuition in Fichte, a preliminary autogenetic deed-act (Tathandlung), ‘the immediate consciousness that I act, […] whereby I know something because I do it’ (1970: 217; 1982: 38), which has become unconscious (bewußtlos) in Schelling. Hamilton recognizes the significance of Schelling’s concept, but remains hostile. Founded on ‘the annihilation of consciousness’ (1852: 20), he opines, this philosophy of the unconditioned is fit only for Laputa, Swift’s flying island. Indeed, according to Hamilton, Schelling simply reinstates the ‘veil of Isis’ (1852: 22).22 Here, Hamilton’s language begins to suggest the Ideen, with the aim of Schelling’s system being to ‘reach the point of indifference’ (1852: 21). The allusion is to the concept of Indifferenz, another first, at least in the published English literature on Schelling.23 The idea had been introduced in the Ideen and it became central to both Schelling’s philosophy up to the period of the Freiheitsschrift in 1809,

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but Hamilton misunderstands Indifferenz both as a condition of subjectivity, and as the termination of Schelling’s idealism. In point of fact, Schelling’s Indifferenz is a moment forever in flux—a point which he develops in the Erster Entwurf, a text which, tellingly, we have no evidence of Hamilton having read.24 Ultimately it is this gap in Hamilton’s understanding that allows him to dismiss Schelling’s philosophy of the unconditioned. If ‘to think is to condition’, as Hamilton maintains, then the conditioned is ‘the only possible object of knowledge and positive thought’ (1852: 14). Ironically, given the date of the essay’s composition (the period of Schelling’s positive philosophy), Schelling is read through Hegel as being an essentially ‘negative’ rather than ‘positive’ thinker. Hamilton’s own position returns to a reconstructed Kantianism: ‘all that we know, is only known as “won from the void and formless Infinite.”’ (1852: 14)25 But regardless of these misgivings, Hamilton’s essay was hugely influential and introduced entire generations of British readers to Schelling’s thought.

Necromancers and Mystics: Carlyle and Schelling According to Jeffrey, Hamilton’s essay was ‘ten times more mystical than anything […] Carlyle ever wrote, and not half so agreeably written’ (Napier 1879: 70). However, Carlyle himself saw it as a product ‘of much metaphysical reading and meditation’ (1977: 64). Carlyle’s preeminent role in facilitating the British reception of German literature has long been acknowledged, but precisely how widely, or how closely, he read the philosophy of Kant and his heirs has been more contentious. Wellek perhaps sums up this ambivalence most keenly in his essay on ‘Carlyle and German Romanticism’ (1929) where he asserts that Carlyle ‘completely […] misunderstood and misinterpreted German Idealism’ (1965: 36). But while Wellek overstated the case, and a number of critics have sought to rehabilitate Carlyle’s reputation, the significance of his reading of Schelling has not been widely acknowledged.26 For instance, while C. F. Harrold was more willing than Wellek to grant the significance of Kant in his influential Carlyle and German Thought (1934), he contends that Carlyle’s reading of Schelling was ‘limited to his popular works’ such as the Methode (1934: 15), a dismissive approach which was carried over into later Carlyle criticism. Indeed, some forty years later, Jerry Dibble’s The Pythia’s Drunken Song mentions Schelling only once, in a moment both syntactically and conceptually marginalised. He speaks

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of the way in which ‘philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel’ responded to Kant’s Copernican Revolution (1978: 25), but then proceeds to analyse his debts to Fichte in detail, and to devote an entire chapter to a discussion of Hegel, whom Carlyle had almost certainly not read, but to pass over his reading of Schelling in silence. And if Schelling fares somewhat better in Elizabeth Vida’s Romantic Affinities, her discussion of Fichte overwhelms that of his successor, who Carlyle discusses ‘in a fumbling fashion and a somewhat mangled context’ (1993: 142). For critics such as Wellek, Harrold and even Vida, the question is whether, in reading Schelling, Carlyle had really read Schelling, or whether he simply reduced him to Kant. Such would be the position of another of Carlyle’s early critics, Eward Flügel, who concluded that Kant’s ‘great successors [had] really no striking differences’ for Carlyle (1891: 93). True enough, when approached in 1841 regarding his reading of German philosophy, Carlyle stated ‘that after all the Fichteisms, Schellingisms, Hegelisms [sic.], I still understand Kant to be the grand novelty, the prime author of the new spiritual world, of whom all the others are but superficial, transient modifications’ (1980: 227–229). Yet this was Carlyle’s later opinion, and earlier in his career he was far more adventurous. In point of fact, it is quite possible that Carlyle had read less Kant than Schelling, perhaps no more than 150 pages of first Kritik (Dibble 1978: 2). On this basis, it is instructive to look at precisely how a marginalisation of Schelling came about in Carlyle studies. Harrold justifies his dismissive comments by recourse to a reference in the Notebooks: Mentions of Schelling are frequent enough to warrant our inferring his intense interest in Schelling’s ideas. That he understood him, however, or read widely in him, is very doubtful. We gather from his Notebooks that either at Comely Bank or early at Craigenputtock, he was pondering ‘Schelling’s Ideal Realism, Philosophy of Nature … usually called the System of Identity … subject and object as absolutely identical.’ The next phrase is expressive of his incapacity to follow metaphysical argument; he adds: ‘to which [this: Harrold misquotes] I can attach next to no meaning.’ (1934: 15)

The first thing to note is that the entry in question, dating from 1827, was occasioned by Carlyle’s reading of a French article on ‘Probleme de l’esprit humain’ by Philipp-Albert Stapfer (1766–1840), which discusses

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Fichte and Schelling in the context of Kant. Looking at Carlyle’s entry without Harrold’s gloss is illuminating: Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism, ‘elimination of the object’; that is deducing the not-me from the me? Schelling’s Ideal Realism, Philosophy of Nature, but usually called the System of Identity; ‘because it represents the subject and the object as absolutely identical and commingling and compounding themselves in intellectual intuition.’ – To this I can attach next to no meaning. (1989: 112)

Two things are immediately apparent through comparison. Harrold’s ellipses pass over the opening of quotation marks in the Notebooks: the passage is Carlyle’s translation of Stapfer, and marked explicitly as such.27 This is important: Carlyle’s statement may refer to a confusion regarding Schelling’s concept of the Anschauung, or it may refer to his confusion over Stapfer’s discussion, but this crucial ambiguity is effaced by Harrold in eliding the two voices. Yet perhaps even more significant is another of Harrold’s omissions: he chooses not to quote the preceding statement on Fichte, which is likewise taken from Stapfer and likewise occasions comment from Carlyle.28 If Carlyle ‘can attach no meaning’ to Schelling’s treatment of the Anschauung here, then it is equally true that he can attach little meaning to that of Fichte, as indicated by his telling punctuation: ‘that is deducing the not-me from the me?’ The question mark leaves Carlyle’s decision hanging, embodying both a sense of confusion and sceptical irony with respect to Fichte. Regardless, one thing is absolutely clear: in 1827, Carlyle was as reticent and uncertain with respect to Fichte as Schelling, if not more so. Preferential critical readings of one German over the other do not seem tenable on the basis of this evidence. Carlyle first mentions Schelling in a letter of 16 March 1821, writing to placate Robert Mitchell that he maintained little interest in proselytising on ‘the mazes of Kantism’: As to Kant and Schelling and Fichte and all those worthies, I profess myself but an esoteric after all; and whoever can imagine that Stewart and Hume with Reid and Brown to help them have sounded all the depths of our nature, or which is better, can contrive to overlook those mysteries entirely, – is too fortunate a gentleman for me to intermeddle with. (1973: 343)29

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Perhaps significantly, Carlyle from this first reference sets Schelling into conflict with the Scottish common sense of Stewart and Brown, then dominant at Edinburgh.30 Yet precisely how engaged Carlyle was in reading the post-Kantian ‘worthies’ in the early 1820s is uncertain. What is certain, however, is that towards the end of the decade he became seriously interested in Schelling. In 1827, he was reading Stapfer and that same year he began Schelling’s Methode in the 1809 Schriften (Vida 1993: 140), in preparation to write ‘The State of German Literature’, published by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review in October. Where Carlyle obtained his copy of the Schriften is a matter of interest, and two names recommend themselves: those of his friend, David Aitken (1796–1875), Minister of Minto, and of Hamilton himself. In 1830, in the same letter in which he praised Hamilton, speaking of another project on the ‘History of German Literature’, Carlyle remarks that Napier’s ‘Collection, so liberally opened to me, will be of little service’ (1977: 63),31 and at this point he turned to the library of Aitken.32 Touring Germany in 1826, Aitken met a series of eminent figures, including Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, whose influence on Carlyle is well established and whose work he helped to publicise in Britain.33 At Tieck’s, Aitken also met the American writer Washington Irving (1783–1859), the three discussing Scott (Ritchie 1894: 120), while Schlegel apparently spoken warmly of Lockhart’s 1818 English translation of his Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur (1815) (Ritchie 1894: 122–123).34 Arriving in Berlin, Aitken met both Schleiermacher, ‘a man divided against himself ’ (108), and Strauss, whose sermons were surprisingly ‘very orthodox’ (116), and most significantly, Hegel. When David George Ritchie (1853–1903) edited extracts from Aitken’s diaries for publication in 1894, he recalled the descriptions of Hegel as being ‘less picturesque’ than those he had heard in 1873–1874 (106), but they remain fascinating.35 According to Aitken, Hegel was interested in ‘Scotch metaphysics’ (110), English politics (117), and was a regular reader of the Edinburgh Review (106), meaning that he would have known of Hamilton. ‘A man of great original genius’, but as a lecturer unable to express himself clearly (116), Aitken recalls Hegel being more fluent in private, where he helped him navigate Schelling. ‘No one of Schelling’s writings’, Hegel remarked, ‘gives a good idea of his principles. They rise and are concentrated – [he] has expressed them most condensedly

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and decidedly in some numbers of a Zeitschrift’ (111).36 In 1826, Schelling himself was in Munich, where Aitken travelled in late June, and while they may have met, it seems unlikely as no record remains in his diaries. However, his interest was keen, and it seems likely Aitken’s substantial collection of German works would have included titles by Schelling. Another source for Carlyle’s knowledge of Schelling was Hamilton. In a letter to Veitch dated 1868, Carlyle recalls meeting Hamilton for the first time around 1824 at the Advocate’s Library, when they spoke ‘mainly about German books, philosophies and persons’ (Veitch 1864: 123). When Carlyle moved to Edinburgh in 1826, they became regular acquaintances, until he left for Craigenputtock in 1828, and the association resumed in winter 1832–1833, when he heard Hamilton deliver a notable paper attacking the phrenologist George Combe (1788–1858); these were the precise years in which Carlyle undertook his serious reading of Schelling (Veitch 1864: 120–127). Carlyle was a key figure at Hamilton’s salons, where the literati of Edinburgh regularly congregated, and Ralph Jessop suggests that Carlyle had access to Hamilton’s library (1997: 36).37 From there, he may have borrowed the Schriften, and in addition to the works in Hamilton’s library, Carlyle also shows a knowledge of Schelling’s Von der Weltseele (1798) (1897: 25: 109), which he refers to in his revised Life of Schiller (1845), a text which he must have sourced from elsewhere, perhaps Aitken. If Aitken did not meet Schelling, then Carlyle’s brother certainly did. John visited Germany between October 1827 and February 1829, basing himself in Munich, and from the very beginning of his brother’s stay, Carlyle presses him on Schelling.38 In a letter of 25 October, discussing local gossip and the politics of the recently established Blackwood’s, he immediately enquires: ‘Is Schelling at Munich, and accessible?’ (1976: 272). His article on ‘The State of German Literature’ had been published earlier that month in the Review, and his interest in Schelling had been piqued. In his next correspondence, dated 29 November, and presumably having heard no word on the subject, he insists, ‘and is Schelling, the Philosopher, in your University?’ (1976: 292), the italics perhaps registering a friendly impatience. John was by now attending Schelling’s lectures on modern philosophy, delivered in Munich over the winter semester, and in his reply, dated 29 December, he recalls his impressions:

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Schelling is a littlish man [who] reads slowly and with remarkable distinctness and precision […]. His style is an iron style with no superf [l]uous ornament. He has many similes it is true, but these are told in the firmest language, and no word or idea comes forward that has not its meaning. […] He reads for the first time in Münich, and as he says himself [,] gives the first complete account of his Philosophie. Hitherto he has been employed in giving a review of the systems of Spinosa [sic.], Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte: and has said almost nothing about his own as yet. […] He said at the end of his review of the system of Fichte, ‘The philosophy of Fichte was like lightning, it showed itself only for an instant, but it kindled a fire which will burn forever’. (1976: 318n)

Carlyle was pleased with the description and replied to his brother on 1 February: ‘warmly do I commend your purpose of studying Philosophy under such a man.’ John is advised to take the opportunity to gain ‘some real Knowledge of this high matter’, Carlyle hoping that through his contact with Schelling a new spirit of philosophy might emerge to ‘“wash away” the insipid palabra which for the present disgraces Britain in this matter’. This ‘disgrace’ is specifically named Stewart, linked by Carlyle to Cousin, who he has less time for than Hamilton had. Cousin ‘arrogates to himself the opinions which he is hardly able even to steal’, he remarks, referring to his dependence on Schelling, and for Carlyle, both Stewart and Cousin alike were ‘two tired garrons, grazing in the meadow’ (1976: 318–319). In a letter of 6 February, in anticipation of Carlyle’s continued interest (for his letter of five days earlier could not have arrived by then), John writes: I still hear the lectures of Schelling thrice a week, and though there is much that I cannot understand, I feel I shall derive great benefit from them. The spirit, geniality, clearness and firm precision with which he states his principles are not lost for me, and will banish that portion of selfsufficient [sic.] scepticism, which I have imbued from the conclusions of Scotch philosophy […]. I wish you could see the toleration and compassionate gentleness with which Schelling speaks of the Utilitarians in Philosophy, and the composure with which he at length dismisses them from the scene of action. Hitherto he has been giving an introduction, and has just commenced with his own System, which I yet comprehend almost nothing of. (1976: 333 n.)

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John’s description suggests that Schelling’s comments on British philosophy in his lectures in Munich were somewhat more moderated than they had been in Jena, if one accepts the account of Crabb Robinson (Morley 1929: 118; Robinson 1869: 1: 128). By this point, John had received a personal introduction to Schelling from Sulpiz Boisserée (1783–1854), an art collector. They spoke of Coleridge (a common topic of conversation with his British visitors), who Schelling thought ‘understood the German Philosophy but did not speak clearly of it’, before discussing Carlyle himself: ‘The Baron [David von Eichthal (1775–1850)] told him of your Article, and I must send it to him as he is very desirous of knowing what can appear in the Edr Review in favour of German Literature’ (1976: 333–334 n.). A month later, Carlyle replied to John, but interestingly chose not to take up the subject of his own work. Instead, he finds himself ‘glad to find both that you admire Schelling and know that you do not understand him’, and advises his brother ‘look into the deeply significant regions of Transcendental Philosophy (as all Philosophy must be), and feel that there are wonders and mighty truths hidden in them; but look with your clear grey Scottish eyes and shrewd solid Scottish understanding, and refuse to be mystified even by your admiration’ (1976: 333–334). In the margins of the manuscript, Carlyle adds that he is actively seeking copies of German texts (‘What is Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre to be had for? And when is Schelling to publish his bibliographi[es?]’), before again attacking Cousin: ‘Does Schelling know Cousin – a little French thief I suspect? Tell me more and more about Schelling, and get as well acquainted with him as you honourably can’ (1976: 339). Carlyle avoids discussing Schelling in his next couple of responses, but John’s letter of 1 March related Schelling’s reading of ‘The State of German Literature’: Two or three nights ago I saw Schelling, and he told me he had read it, and was much satisfied with the ‘Edelmuth und hohem Geist’ [nobleness and high spirit] in which it is written, and with the justice of your remarks on the German philosophy; but that some of the opinions which you had expressed regarding German Literature might be disputed. (1976: 357n.)39

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Only a couple of months after this letter, Crabb Robinson would meet ‘the not-yet-forgotten’ Schelling once again while touring Italy, passing through Carlsbad, where Schelling vacationed: I had been a pupil of his, but an insignificant one, and never a partisan. I believe he did not recollect me. He talked with some constraint during our walk in the Wandelbahn, but meeting him afterwards at dinner, I found him communicative, and were I remaining at Carlsbad, his company would be very pleasant to me. (1869: 2: 446)

The two men spoke of Schlegel and Tieck, of the politics and religion of Ludwig I (1786–1868), King of Bavaria, of Goethe’s political reticence, and of the new satirical poetry of Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862) and Graf Platen (1796–1835) (1869: 2: 446–447). When the topic turned to the British reception of German philosophy, Schelling ‘spoke of Coleridge and Carlyle as men of talent, who are acquainted with German philosophy. He says Carlyle is certainly the author of the articles in the Edinburgh Review’ (1869: 2: 447). His information must have originated from John Carlyle.40 By 5 May, John remained mystified by the intricacies of the positive philosophy: ‘after all my prattling […], I must confess, at the conclusion I found that I had not understood him, and that […] his philosophy was a lost philosophy for me.’ Undeterred, however, he attended Schelling’s summer lectures on the philosophy of mythology, which he claims were soon to be published as ‘a sort of preparation to his other lectures which will be afterwards printed’ (1976: 378n); of course, it would be many years before this promise of publication became a reality. Carlyle, replying on 10 June, and now recovered from his fit of hubris, again asks for books, and asks after the lectures on mythology: ‘What says Schelling, [and] what does the Doctor [i.e. John] now think of him?’ (1976: 383). Presumably, John made no mention of his progress with these new lectures, and the subject was dropped from their correspondence until John was again in Munich some eight years later. When he read ‘The State of German Literature’, Schelling would no doubt have detected the influence of his Methode, read for the very purpose of its composition and cited therein as authority (1897: 26: 83 n.). Ostensibly a review of two recent histories of German literature published by Franz Horn (1781–1856),41 Carlyle turns in the context

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of Novalis to a discussion of the ‘Transcendental Philosophers, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling’ towards the end of the essay. Together, they are popularly deemed ‘the chief mystics in Germany’, and Kant the ‘tenebrific constellation’ from which idealism springs42: The pious and peaceful sage of Königsberg passes for a sort of Necromancer and Black-artist in Metaphysics; his doctrine is a region of boundless baleful gloom, too cunningly broken here and there by splendours of unholy fire; spectres and tempting demons people it, and, hovering over fathomless abysses, hang gay and gorgeous air-castles, into which the hapless traveller is seduced to enter, and so sinks to rise no more. (1897: 26: 74)

For Carlyle, however, the followers have badly let down their master, for ‘there is not one that so ill meets the conditions of a mystic’ as the ‘quiet, vigilant, clear-sighted’ Kant (1897: 26: 74). Schelling is distinguished from the ‘mystics’ as ‘a man evidently of deep insight into individual things’, but one whose insights currently remain beyond Carlyle: ‘we had not yet appreciated his truth, and therefore could not appreciate his error’ (1897: 26: 76). An unfinished portrait from an unformed opinion, but it is clear that Carlyle held Schelling in high esteem and deemed him noteworthy and significant. Carlyle characterises this essay as a moment of an irresistible narrative of the naturalising of idealism for the British audience (1897: 26: 78). Indeed, by 23 September 1835, when John was again resident in Munich, Carlyle remarked: ‘You can tell Herr Schelling when you see him that he has more friends here than he wots of; that the thing he has thought in his solitary soul has passed or is ready to pass into many souls, of British speech, and do its work there’ (1980: 213). Schelling was again lecturing on the philosophy of mythology, and Carlyle writes of his wish to hear these lectures (1980: 260, 310). In February 1836, he asked John to convey to Schelling his ‘hope […] that I shall one day see him in this world’ (1980: 310). Carlyle finally visited Germany in 1852, escorted by Joseph Neuberg (1806–1867), his Manchester-based acolyte who had translated both Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) and Past and Present (1843) into German.43 In an interview published in The Critic in November 1852, Carlyle claimed to have had an audience with both Tieck and Schelling, the latter of whom was ‘a high, abstruse,

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speculative personage, who mounts quite out of sight in his talk occasionally’. Schelling was ‘very curious about England’, Carlyle continues, ‘in spite of her rather rude, and on the whole, perhaps, not altogether justifiable rejection of [his] metaphysics’ (1881: 2: 127).

‘Pantheism in New Clothes’: Sartor Resartus When Crabb Robinson quipped that German philosophy ‘changes its coat every year’, Schelling replied that that was proof that ‘the English do not look deeper than the coat’ (1869: 1: 129–130). This was certainly not a comment which would have applied to Carlyle however. Indeed, perhaps this anecdote, should Crabb Robinson have related it to Carlyle, may have planted some of the seeds for the idea which would become the novel Sartor Resartus.44 Certainly, Carlyle’s renewed interest in engaging John on Schelling in the mid-1830s must be contextualised alongside the serialisation of Sartor Resartus in Frazer’s Magazine, 1833–1834. If Carlyle was still finding his feet in 1827, by the 1830s he had developed a nuanced appreciation of Schelling’s philosophy. Of course, Carlyle had not simply been converted to Schelling, and in Sartor he maintains a critical distance, with the novel’s hypodiegetic conceits ensuring that we cannot simply equate their positions. The text is given to the reader as an unnamed editor’s attempt to introduce his British readership to the idealist philosophy of clothes of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh [God-born Devil-dung], Professor of ‘Things in General’ (contrasting with Kant’s Dinge-an-sich) at Weissnichtwo [Knownot-where] University, and is divided into various fragmentary parts: the editor’s narrative, excerpts from Teufelsdröckh’s magnum opus Die Kleider ihr Werden und Werken [Clothes, their Origin and Influence], from his biography, and the editor’s disillusioned critical commentary. In a sense, Carlyle is both the editor, imbued with a traditional Scottish scepticism, and Teufelsdröckh, a ‘striver after the Idea’ (1976: 271). Or rather, he is both and neither simultaneously. But regardless, it is in this text that the depth of Carlyle’s engagement with Schelling becomes apparent, for it is in Sartor, more than any other preceding work, that the full significance of Schelling’s break with Fichte over intellektuelle Anschauung began to be dramatised to the British public. Carlyle’s primary engagement with Schelling takes place in the central chapters of the novel documenting Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual conversion. These passages have generally been read by Carlyle’s critics alongside the

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author’s own religious epiphany, experienced at Leith Walk, Edinburgh, in June 1821, or alongside the theology of Jean Paul (1763–1825).45 Significantly, for our purposes, Teufelsdröckh appeals to the example of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre towards the conclusion of ‘The Everlasting Yea’ (1987: 148), a citation that has proven enticing for Carlyle’s critics. For Dibble, for instance, the experience described in Sartor is ‘almost exactly the same as that of the concept of intellectual intuition in Fichte’ (1978: 19).46 But this seems an oversimplification. Two chapters earlier, in ‘The Everlasting No’, Teufelsdröckh had been in ‘a state of crisis, of transition’ (1987: 123), following his unsuccessful attempt to win the love of Blumine. ‘Wholly irreligious’, his ‘Doubt had darkened into Unbelief’ (124), and the world is figured as a postlapsarian wasteland ruled by ‘an absentee God, sitting idle’ (125). ‘The painfullest feeling’, Teufelsdröckh continues, ‘is that of your own Feebleness (Unkraft)’ (126), and it is conscious activity that must reply to Unkraft.47 ‘A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us’, Teufelsdröckh continues, ‘which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible’ (126). These ‘Works’ are the Fichtean ‘acts’ (Tathandlungen), and the term ‘Unrest’ (1987: 123), which might be translated as Unruhe, might also be translated in a Fichtean context as Streben, ‘striving’.48 ‘In relation to a possible object’, Fichte comments, ‘the pure self-reverting activity of the self is […] an infinite striving [unendliches Streben]’ (1965: 397; 1982: 231). Faced with his objectless Fear, Teufelsdröckh has a revelatory and transcendental experience which comes to him intuitively, affective, as a kind of Gefühl, ‘feeling’, in the sense in which Novalis puts it, commenting on Fichte, saying ‘Philosophy is originally a Feeling’ (1982: 113; 2003: 13). It was at this moment that ‘the EVERLASTING NO (das ewige Nein) [had] pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME’, Teufelsdröckh remarks: ‘It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man’ (1987: 129). So far, so Fichtean. And yet, there remains a significant issue here, indicated in the very structure of the narrative. If Teufelsdröckh dates his spiritual renaissance to this ‘Baphometic Fire-baptism’, why does the next chapter not describe the man reborn? Why do we find ourselves caught in the ‘Centre of Indifference’ (the name of the next chapter), rather than witnessing the revelatory and transformative powers of Fichtean activity incarnated? Why is Teufelsdröckh not yet identical

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with the Absolute? Indeed, these are questions that his Editor will also begin to probe, asking later whether ‘“that high moment in the Rue de l’Enfer”, [was] then, properly the turning point of the battle?’ (141; my emphasis). There is a narratological problem here that disputes the simple equation of Teufelsdröckh’s experiences with a revelation of a Fichtean Anschauung. This ‘Centre of Indifference’ clearly alludes to Schelling’s concept of Indifferenz, a point rarely commented upon in the critical literature. Carlyle may have encountered the idea in Über das Verhältnis der Naturphilosophie zur philosophie überhaupt [On the Relationship between the Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy in General] (1802), a short essay included in the Schriften, as Vida suggests (1993: 136). However, its significance, both narratologically within the internal structure of Sartor Resartus, and conceptually given the weight it carries with respect to Carlyle’s critical engagement with Fichte, suggests that he may have read the Ideen or Erster Entwurf, the former of which he could have borrowed from Hamilton. In Carlyle’s novel, Indifferenz operates as a midpoint between the Everlasting No and Yea, ‘through which whoso travels from the negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass’ (139). It is a necessary moment in this dialectic, and Schelling, in order to elucidate the affective dialectic of potency (Potenz), also has recourse to the model of polarity. This idea of Potenz replies to Fichtean Streben: instead of the consciousness determining the world through its actions, Schelling maintains that the consciousness is potentialized through the forces of Nature. Consciousness, for Schelling, is not the producer of the world, but its product. Nature is affective for Schelling, a fact illustrated by the principles of polarity and magnetism, ‘the general act of animation [Beseelung], the implanting of unity into multiplicity, of the concept into difference’ (SW I.2, 164; 1988: 128). For Schelling, ‘every magnet is a symbol [Sinnbild] of the whole of Nature’ (SW I.3, 253; HKA I.7, 356; 2004: 181 n.). Other Romantic thinkers that Carlyle was reading also had recourse to the model of polarity (most obviously Goethe in his Metamorphose der Pflanzen [1790]), but what is striking here is Carlyle’s use of this image in the direct context of his discussion of Indifferenz, since it is precisely at this same point of in the Ideen that Schelling had first introduced Indifferenz. This is a state where no further internal change in the organism is possible, representing the limit of the subject’s internal and closed self-development. For Fichte, such would be the end-point,

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where the ego has become the Absolute, but for Schelling, Indifferenz is not terminal, but a kind of virtual mid-point, a moment which is only ever passed through in a dialectic of Potenz. The state of Indifferenz ‘must be continually disturbed’ (SW I.3, 162; HKA I.7, 183; 2004: 118). As Coleridge would put it, seen in the light of Schelling, Fichte’s theory constitutes ‘a crude egoismus, a boastful and hypostoic hostility to NATURE, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy’ (1984: 1: 158–159). Whereas for Fichte, the external world exists to be operated upon by the consciousness, Schelling is more generous, and in estimating the extent to which Calyle’s Teufelsdröckh is Fichtean, it is important to question his position regarding Nature. In the chapter on the ‘Center of Indifference’, Teufelsdröckh answers us by suddenly taking an interest in agriculture, those ‘tilled Fields’ which, more than martial ‘Cities’, represent humanity’s ‘Work’ (1897: 132). The metropolis is ‘like a dead City of stones’ compared to ‘a spiritual Field’ (132), Teufelsdröckh remarks, in a passage with echoes of Heidegger and of his reading of Schelling. In these passages, Carlyle traces Schelling’s distinction between Nature as productivity and its products. ‘Of Man’s Activity and Attainment’, Teufelsdröckh exclaims, ‘the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in Tradition only’ (131). The products of man’s activity cannot be ‘fixed’, he states, recalling the language of Schelling’s attack on Fichte in the Erster Entwurf, ‘but must flit, spirit-like’ (131). They are but momentary phenomenal ‘inhibitions’ of the process of productivity. Fichte’s concept of Anschauung is insufficient to understand Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual journey, even though we have now reached that chapter, ‘The Everlasting Yea’, where the Wissenschaftslehre will be cited. If Indifferenz is understood by Schelling to be the logical product of Fichte’s ego as Absolute, then such a state, the return to the universal, can only be understood as a kind of death. Indeed, in his Philosophische Briefe (1795), Schelling characterises Fichte’s Anschauung as a ‘Zustande des Todes’, a condition of death (KSA I.3, 94). It is a ‘silence as of Death’, Teufelsdröckh remarks (1987: 137), and we can be sure that Carlyle knew the Briefe at least through Hamilton. Indeed, in these pages of Sartor Resartus, more than any other, the influence of ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’ is most pronounced, although Carlyle’s conclusions differ from Hamilton’s. Passing through Indifferenz, as between two poles of the magnet, Teufelsdröckh comes to a revelation that Fichte could not: ‘the Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel house with spectres’ (143). If the Other

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(the ‘NOT-ME’, Nicht-Ich) is something more than a ‘spectre’, neither a ghostly double of the philosophising Ich or the raw material ready to be negated in the process of coming-to-self-consciousness, then Teufelsdröckh’s experience represents something more Schellingean. Rather than speak of the annihilation of Nature as Fichte does, Teufelsdröckh speaks of a kind of self-annihilation, a self-potentialisation that is also a Selbsttödtung: Here, then, as I lay in that CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE; cast, doubtless by benignant upper Influence, into a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (Selbst-tödtung), had been happily accomplished; and my mind’s eyes were now unsealed, and its hands ungyved. (142)

Carlyle’s reference here is to Novalis’s commentary on Fichte in a fragment of 1797: ‘The genuine philosophical act is the dying of the self [Selbsttötung]; this is the real origin of all philosophy, […] and only this act complies with all of the conditions and features of the transcendental activity’ (1982: 395).49 But there are subtle differences, not least in Carlyle’s translation of ‘echt’ which more readily corresponds to the English ‘proper’ (from old German ēhaft, ‘lawful’), and which he gives as ‘preliminary’. As a ‘preliminary’ stage, Teufelsdröckh’s notion is of a Selbsttödtung that does not, as in Fichte, lead to either to the negation of the external world or the negation of the self in the Absolute. Rather, what it precipitates is a negation of a certain closed understanding of the self, and it carries with it a return to the world and to nature, an affirmation of the power of life as productive potential. ‘What is Nature?’ Teufelsdröckh cries, ‘Ha! Why do I not name thee God?’ (1987: 143). The image of Fichte has receded, with Teufelsdröckh speaking with Schelling, and what is at stake a question of a certain kind of pantheism. Teufelsdröckh quotes Goethe’s Faust (1806–1808), ‘Art thou not the “Living Garment of God”’, picking up the central metaphor of Sartor Resartus, to suggest that Nature is God’s clothing. Franz von Baader (1765–1841), Schelling’s one-time friend, later suggested that his Naturphilosophie had done little more than seek to patch up the old robes of pantheism in new clothes (1857: 455), phrasing resonant of Carlyle’s playful masquerade in Sartor Resartus.50 But the clothing analogy in Teufelsdröckh’s pseudo-metaphysics is important: what is

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suggested is not the pantheistic identity of God and Nature, but rather Nature as the visible and tangible substance through which God’s essence is disclosed, ‘an essence indeed inseparable [unabtrennliches], yet still distinct [unterschiedenes], from him’, as Schelling would put it in the Freiheitsschrift (SW I.7, 358; 2006: 27). For Teufelsdröckh, as for Schelling, consciousness is a product, not a progenitor. It is not originary, as had Fichte maintained, but preceded by its groundless ground, the Ungrund, ‘a thinking which does not think [ein nicht denkendes Denken]’ (SW I.10, 151; 1994: 153). It comes as no surprise then to discover that an idea of unconscious ground appears in these key passages of Sartor Resartus. Teufelsdröckh hears ‘the din of many-voiced Life’ (1987: 144), what Schelling would call the world of ‘bewußtloses Thätigheit’ [unconscious activity], a key concept which he develops in his System, and which precedes the movement of Fichtean Anschauung.51 This Teufelsdröckh experiences as a residual ‘din’ inside himself, ‘like inarticulate cries, and sobbings of a dumb creature’ (1987: 144). In fact, it is tempting to read these pages of Sartor Resartus in dialogue with the Weltalter. There, Schelling had sought ‘to trace the long trail of development [Entwicklungen] from the present back into the deepest night [die tiefste Nacht] of the past’ (SW I.8, 200; 2000: xxxv–vi), a tief or profound movement beyond the self-grounding Fichtean Anschauung. ‘All consciousness is grounded on the unconscious’ (I.8, 262; 44), Schelling contends, and the idea of Unrast or Unruhe returns here. ‘Natural life within a person’, Schelling writes, ‘if it cannot find the higher spiritual potency [höhere geistige Potenz], falls prey to inner unrest [Unruhe], to that to and fro movement without meaning and purpose [Sinn und Zweck] that is the characteristic of madness [Wahnsinns]’ (I.8, 260; 43). We recall here that the Editor also speaks of Wahnsinn, of Teufelsdröckh’s Unrest as ‘a mad fermentation’ (1987: 123). Teufelsdröckh tarries with insanity, overcomes it, at that point where ‘the mad primeval Discord is hushed’ (149), but at the same time retains it as that Unruhe which is productive. As Schelling would put it, such madness does not originate in the subject, but in Nature itself, coming forth only ‘as something that is always there’ (SW I.8, 339; 2000: 104). Erupting from the unconscious, it is the uncanny that returns. It is at this point, one of an Indifferenz associated with a Selbsttödtung, and of an unconscious life, of forces and potencies that operate as the groundless ground underwriting any act of intellektuelle

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Anschauung, that we arrive at the citation which has misdirected many critical approaches to Sartor Resartus. Passing comment on what appears to be the entire narrative of his spiritual revelation, Teufelsdröckh states: ‘If Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre be, “to a certain extent, Applied Christianity”, surely to a still greater extent, so is this’ (1987: 148). Yet this reference is vastly more complicated than it first appears, requiring that we take care when attempting to compare Teufelsdröckh with Fichte. The quotation within the quotation is indirectly taken from Novalis, via Carlyle’s own essay ‘Novalis’ (1829): ‘The Catholic Religion is to a certain extent applied Christianity. Fichte’s philosophy too is perhaps applied Christianity’ (1897: 27: 42). Ostensibly a translation of Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa [Christianity or Europe] (1799),52 comparison with Carlyle’s source reveals something surprising. The passage in question, differentiating three kinds of Christianity (one focused on joy, one on mediation, and the last a belief in Christ, Mary and the Saints), reads as follows: ‘The old catholic faith, the last of these forms, was applied Christianity come to life’ (1826: 1: 208; 1996: 78).53 While the following sentences of Novalis’s text explain what he understands by this ‘applied’ Christianity, they make no mention of Fichte. The remarkable conclusion we are led to draw seems to be that the entire second sentence of Carlyle’s ‘translation’ is either a misrecollection or a fabrication, his own analogy and not Novalis’s. Regardless of the source, however, two things should be noted: firstly, Carlyle adds the qualification ‘to a certain extent’ to the sentence he has adapted from Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa, a qualification not present in the original; secondly, the word ‘perhaps’ is used in establishing the analogy to Fichte. Regardless of whether the phrase is attributed to Novalis or Carlyle, then, the analogy drawn between Fichte and ‘applied Christianity’ is doubly precarious. Returning to the text of Sartor Resartus we find the phrase within quotation marks. It seems, then, that Teufelsdröckh’s quotation is an autocitation by Carlyle, in the kind of moment of intertextual reflexivity that has made Sartor Resartus so appealing to poststructuralist criticism.54 But more importantly for our purposes, the qualifiers are compounded in the text of Sartor Resartus. ‘If Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre be, “to a certain extent, Applied Christianity”’, Teufelsdröckh muses, with Carlyle introducing a connector that predicates the logic, so that what follows is only true insofar as the predicate holds. Teufelsdröckh does not actually state that the Wissenschaftslehre constitutes ‘Applied

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Christianity’, only that it might do so. On the condition that it is true, however, he continues: ‘surely to a still greater extent, so is this’ (1987: 148). To a ‘greater extent’ then, it is Teufelsdröckh’s narrative that constitutes this ‘Applied Christianity’. Teufelsdröckh’s point is not so much that Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre constitutes applied Christianity, or that his own experience is akin to Fichtean Anschauung, although both of these ideas are of course also present. Rather, Teufelsdröckh’s point is that Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is a partial narrative, partial precisely since at its conclusion, it leaves us in a situation where his ‘Unrest was but increased’ (130), not sated. And it is this experience which, as we have seen, may be understood by recourse to Schelling’s theory of Indifferenz. Carlyle’s treatment of Schelling made advances on that of Hamilton. ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’ contributed two significant ‘firsts’: the first published acknowledgment of the significance of Schelling’s concept of the Anschauung, and the first published reference to Schelling’s idea of Indifferenz. But published only four years later, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus makes a far more rigorous case for Schelling’s philosophy. As Erik Irving Gray contends, Schelling’s concept of Indifferenz ‘became familiar to English audiences only when Carlyle introduced it in Sartor Resartus’ (2005: 16–17). Yet, at the same time, Schelling, unlike Fichte or Hegel, is not named in Sartor Resartus, and so Carlyle’s place in the narrative of Schelling’s reception is itself difficult to place. Perhaps this was in part because of his brother’s relationship with Schelling, fearful of offending him. Indeed, it is clear that Carlyle saw Schelling, or one of Schelling’s protégés, in some part behind the figure of Teufelsdröckh, as demonstrated by his letter of 23 September 1835, where, shortly after asking John to assure Schelling of his rising numbers of followers in Britain, he exclaims: ‘it seems to me always you ought to meet Teufelsdröckh in some of the Coffeehouses of Munich!’ (1980: 214). But Carlyle is not simply a protégé, nor is Teufelsdröckh simply a mask of Schelling. Significantly, it is precisely at the moment when Schelling’s philosophy supplants Fichte’s, the moment of ‘the Everlasting Yea’, that the narrative breaks off. This moment where Indifferenz is suspended is itself suspended in the text of Sartor; anticipated, but never coming to fruition. The following chapter, entitled ‘Pause’, appears set to begin following Teufelsdröckh through his ‘spiritual majority’ (1987: 149), but is cut short by the Editor who eventually ‘give[s] utterance to a painful suspicion which […] has begun to haunt him’, namely that ‘these Autobiographical Documents are partly a

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Mystification’ (153). The hypodiegetic structure of the narrative means that we cannot simply take the narrative of ‘conversion’ at face-value, and must consider it always through a detached and ironic perspective.55 If Fichte’s Anschauung holds true only ‘to a certain extent’, likewise any reading of Sartor Resartus alongside Schelling must also be always provisional. What is certain, however, is that, whether the treatment in Sartor Resartus be ironic or not, Carlyle was a far more attentive and subtle reader of Schelling than has hitherto been accepted. Most significantly, through Carlyle, the stakes of Schelling’s reply to Fichte became popularized and dramatized to his Victorian audience. Yet, at the same time, Schelling is liminal at the precise moment when he becomes most proximate. If Sartor Resartus shows Carlyle’s deep engagement with Schelling on the Anschauung, Indifferenz, and the relationship between consciousness and Nature, such an engagement takes place surreptitiously, in a displaced manner. Schelling is always present, just below the surface, but never permitted to speak in his own right. As such, the Schelling of Sartor Resartus resounds as another uncanny echo.

Notes





1. On Hazlitt’s review in context, see Wu (2002). 2. Stewart discusses Kant in his Dissertation, but on the basis apparently of only limited first-hand knowledge. Jonathan Friday, for instance, suggests Stewart is nearly wholly reliant on Kant’s De mundi sensibilis (1770) for his understanding of critical philosophy (2005: 266 n.10). 3.  Stewart’s principle source was de Gérando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (1804). Other sources are de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, Pierre Prévost in his translation of Stewart’s 1795 edition of Adam Smith (1797), Gérard Gley’s Essai sur les éléments de la philosophie (1817) and Louis de Bonald’s Recherches Philosophiques (1818). 4. See the manuscripts held at University of Glasgow’s Hamilton special collection: ‘Theoretische Philosophie. I. Logick. II. Metaphysick. III. Aesthetick oder Geschmacks-Lehre. 1817’, MS Hamilton 28. 5. Hamilton would eventually name his dog Hermann in his honour. 6. These notes, taken down in German, are MS Hamilton 32–37, covering Logic, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Psychology, Ontology and Practical Philosophy, held at Glasgow University Library. Two notable orators at the University that summer were Schopenhauer and Hegel: the summer of 1820 witnessed Schopenhauer’s disastrous course, which drew only

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five students, whereas Hegel simultaneously lectured to packed auditoriums on the Phenomenology of Spirit. 7. For Gillies’ recollection of Hamilton, see (1851: 3: 93–95). 8.  There are no records of a Professor Jamieson at either Edinburgh or Glasgow at this time, but if he did spell the name correctly, Veitch may have meant John Jamieson (1759–1838), author of the Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808). Dr. John Jamieson was interested in languages, but never went into academia. 9. On the Review and its politics, see Stafford (2002), Stabler (2002), and Wu (2002) on Jeffrey’s strained relations with Byron, Hazlitt and Coleridge. See also Christie (2009). 10.  Napier had published anonymously a pamphlet entitled Hypocrisy Unveiled, and Calumny Detected, attacking both Wilson and Lockhart, but Wilson divined the author and replied with a letter addressed ‘To the Author of Hypocrisy Unveiled’, challenging Napier to a duel which never came to fruition. 11. On Jeffrey’s resignation, see Cockburn (1852: 1: 282–283). 12.  This title was given to the piece retrospectively; the text collected in Discussions is identical to the 1829 review save additional footnotes, and I quote from this edition. 13. Also retrospective titles: see Hamilton (1852: 39–98, 117–173). 14. On the meeting in Bonn, see Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire (1895: 2: 453; 3: 122–166) for Cousin’s correspondence with Austin. The letters between Austin, Cousin and Hamilton are reproduced in Veitch (1864: 149–155). In a later letter to Napier of 2 January 1845, Austin writes from Paris to ask after Hamilton, paralysed down his right side in late 1844, on Cousin’s behalf, suggesting the depth of their friendship (Napier 1879: 482). 15. After his death, Glasgow University Library purchased around eight thousand volumes in 1878. For a description of the library and Hamilton’s collecting habits, see Veitch (1864: 394–401). 16. We also know that Hamilton was interested in Schelling’s legacy, referring to the preface to the Phänomenologie when speaking of Hegel’s ‘derision’ of the Anschauung as ‘a poetical play of fancy’ (1852: 24n.). However, Hamilton could, on occasion, misattribute the work of other contemporary figures to Schelling: see Hamilton (1863: 2: 748) and compare Maimon (1798: 244). 17. See Hamilton (1860: 1: 6, 50; 2: 527–535; 4: 110). See also his marginal comment in his influential essay on the ‘Philosophy of Perception’ (1852: 92), and his Dissertation (1863: 748, 769, 850, 944; in the latter instance referring to Reinhold on Schelling). Many of these references deal with Schelling’s supposed violation of the logical law of the excluded

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middle, also discussed in the Cousin review (1852: 14), and a recurrent theme in Hamilton’s work on logic, reflecting his life-long fascination with Aristotle. 18. On Kant and Scotland, see Kuehn (1987: 167–207). 19. As Fichte disparagingly remarks, ‘intellectual intuition in the Kantian sense is a wraith [Unding] which fades in our grasp when we try to think it, and deserves not even a name’ (1970: 225; 1982: 46). On Fichte’s engagement with Kant, see Beiser (2002: 294–301). Coleridge certainly considered the question of the Intellektuelle Anschauung in Schelling in detail, as seen in his marginal comments to the Darlegung. For the assumption that Coleridge relied on Schelling in his attack on Kant’s Anschauungen, see Orsini (1969: 189) and Wheeler (1980: 70–80). Class (2012: 174– 180), however, points out that Coleridge’s analysis may instead have been derived from other commentators such as Friedrich August Nitsch (?–1813), who ran the Kantian Society in London. 20. This is a point which is also central to his later evaluation of the relation between Schelling’s thought and the common sense philosophy of Reid in his Dissertation (1863: 2: 769). 21. ‘Act!’, Hamilton exclaims in parentheses, registering an incredulity and sarcasm, although his choice of translation suggests at the same time a reticence to wholly divorce Schelling’s Anschauung from Fichte’s Tathandlung. For perhaps Schelling’s clearest definition of his understanding of Intellektuelle Anschauung, see his comments in his 1802 Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie (SW I.4, 391–392n). 22.  Hamilton’s reference here and in the attending note on Isis as the ‘Ægypto-Greek symbol of the Unconditioned’ is to Plutarch’s Moralia, 354c. 23. Coleridge’s references are either in unpublished work, such as his marginalia to the Philosophische Schriften, or in a context where the fact that he is referring to Schelling’s concept of Indifferenz would not have been clear to uninformed readers. 24. As he writes in the Erster Entwurf, ‘the product, as long as it is organic, can never sink into indifference’ (SW I.3, 90; HKA I.7, 305; 2004: 68); it is a state which ‘must be continually disturbed [gestört]’ (SW I.3, 162; HKA I.7, 183; 2004: 118). 25. The quotation is from Milton’s Paradise Lost, 3.12. As Hamilton writes, the ‘truth’ of Schelling’s so-called ‘negative’ system, lies in Hegel, who ‘at last abandons the Intuition, and regards “pure or undetermined existence” as convertible with “pure nothing”’ (1852: 21). 26.  For general discussions of Carlyle and idealism, see Dilthey (1972), Harrold (1934), and Wellek (1965: 34–81). On Carlyle and Fichte, see Dibble (1978: 15–34) and Rabb (1989).

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27. Compare Stapfer (1827: 418): ‘parce qu’il représente le sujet et l’objet comme absolument identiques et se confondant, se compénétrant dans l’intuition intellectuelle.’ 28. Carlyle reorders Stapfer’s clauses: ‘Élimination de l’objet dans l’idéalisme transcendental de Fichte’ (1827: 418). 29. On Carlyle’s friendship with Mitchell, see Heffer (1995: 38–45). 30. A decade or so earlier, Carlyle himself had the dubious pleasure of studying with Brown, whose lectures were ‘unprofitable utterly & bewildering & dispiriting’ (1974b: 33). Carlyle had arrived at Edinburgh just after Stewart had vacated his chair in favour of Brown. In a fascinating letter of 11 April 1827, Carlyle writes to the Hamburg physician and prison reformer, Nikolaus Heinrich Julius, comparing Stewart unfavourably with Schelling, referring to the former’s work as ‘excellent Camin-philosophie’ but something Schelling would regard with ‘naso adunco’ (1976: 208). In ‘The State of German Literature’, published later the same year, Carlyle notes that the ‘class of disquisitions, named Kamin-Philosophie (Parlour-fire Philosophy) in Germany, is held in little estimation there’ (1897: 26: 75). 31. This ‘History’ became the essay on ‘German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, published in Foreign Quarterly Review, 1831 (1897: 27: 274–332). That Carlyle did not choose to publish in the Edinburgh Review caused bad blood, and Carlyle writes to Napier in his defence on 1 August 1831 (1977: 311). 32. Aitken lent Carlyle a number of German books from his collection which arrived in January 1830: see Carlyle’s letters of 21 December 1829 and 26 January 1830 (the day before he writes to Napier) (1977: 44–46, 59–62). 33. Carlyle would eventually call on Tieck in Berlin, 7 October 1852, having first begun reading him around 1823, translating some of his short stories in his German Romance (1827). For the influence of Tieck and Schlegel on Carlyle, see Vida (1993: 9–23), Wellek (1965: 39–58), and Zeydel (1931: 114–124). 34. Lockhart’s anonymous translation appeared in 1818 as Lectures on the History of Literature. 35. In 1873–1874, Ritchie was studying with the Scottish idealists Henry Calderwood (1830–1897) and Alexander Campbell Fraser (1819–1914) at Edinburgh, before taking up a Snell Exhibition at Balliol in 1875, where he would become influenced by T. H. Green. He would later publish the influential Darwin and Hegel (1893), the year before this portrait of Aitken. On Ritchie’s significance, see den Otter (1996: 28–29, 92–97). 36. Ritchie assumes the text Hegel refers to here is Schelling’s Darstellung, published in his Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik in 1801. If so, Hegel

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must have come to appreciate the text sometime after Jena, for its significance is played down in the Differenzschrift (1970: 2: 117–118; 1997: 175–176). 37. See also Jessop (1997: 28–32) on Carlyle and Hamilton. 38. For an account of the trip, see Clubbe (1971). 39.  John is perhaps misremembering the German, which may have been Schelling quoting Johann Baptist von Alxinger’s (1755–1797) poem ‘Über die Zukunft’ on ‘Der Edelmut mit hohem Geist’ (1784: 136). 40. Later, Crabb Robinson would befriend John as well as Thomas Carlyle, and on 15 May 1837, he records ‘a most agreeable chat’ with John, where the two discussed their conversations with Schelling (1869: 3: 122). 41. Notably, neither of the reviewed books, Die schöne Litteratur Deutschlands (1822–1824) and Umrisse zur Geschichte und Kritik der schönen Literatur Deutschlands (1819), discussed Schelling. 42. The phrase in quotation marks, and a similar one found in his Life of Schiller (1897: 25: 113), seem to misquote Joseph Addison’s article ‘On the Itch of Writing’ (1714): see Whiteley (2018). 43. For accounts of the trip, see Heffer (1995: 295–298) and Kaplan (1983: 387–392). Past and Present had occasioned a review by Friedrich Engels which made significant comparisons between Carlyle and Schelling: ‘For us Germans, who know the antecedents of Carlyle’s position, the matter is clear enough. On the one hand vestiges of Tory romanticism and humane attitudes originating with Goethe, and on the other sceptical-empirical England […]. Like all pantheists, Carlyle has not yet resolved the contradiction, and Carlyle’s dualism is aggravated by the fact that though he is acquainted with German literature, he is not acquainted with its necessary corollary, German philosophy, and all his views are in consequence ingenuous, intuitive, more like Schelling than Hegel. With Schelling – that is to say, with the old Schelling not the Schelling of the philosophy of revelation – Carlyle really has a great deal in common’ (1975: 461). 44. Carlyle and Crabb Robinson first met at Charles Lamb’s in 1824 (1974a: 108), a few years before he began reading Schelling in earnest. 45. On the influence of Richter, see Vijn (1982). 46. See also Vida (1993: 77–88), who analyses these same passages alongside Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschen. 47. A term Carlyle likely borrowed from Zacharias Werner’s (1768–1823) play Die Weihe der Unkraft [The Blessing of Feebleness] (1813). Werner also the source for Carlyle’s use of the image of the Baphomet later in the chapter, taken from Die Söhne des Thals [The Sons of the Valley] (1803–1804).

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48. ‘Unruhe’ is a term with significance in Hegel, as in his discussion of consciousness as ‘die absolute dialektische Unruhe’, or his definition of the Aufhebung as ‘seine Unruhe, sich selbst aufzuheben’ [its own restless process of superseding itself] in the Phänomenologie (§205; 1970: 3: 588; 1977: 491). 49. To translate Selbsttödtung as ‘self-Annihilation’, as Carlyle does, is perhaps (knowingly) misleading. As Maurice Blanchot has argued, ‘Novalis’s affirmation [is] often misquoted or hastily translated: the true philosophical act is the putting to death of oneself (the dying of the self, or the self as dying – Selbsttödtung, not Selbstmord)’ (1995: 32). 50. On Sartor Resartus as masquerade, see Gilles Deleuze’s brief, tantalizing and only published reference to the text: ‘in this domain, as in Sartor Resartus, it is the masked, the disguised or the costumed which turns out to be the truth of the uncovered’ (2004: 27). 51.  See for instance the System (SW I.3, 607–611; 1978: 215–218), and compare Schelling’s comments explicitly in the context of an attack on Fichte in Über den wahren Begriff Naturphilosophie (SW I.4, 86). 52. The fragment went unpublished during Novalis’ lifetime, suppressed from the first edition of his Schriften (1802), edited by Tieck and Schlegel, and only published in full in the fourth edition (1826). It was this last edition that occasioned Carlyle’s essay, published in the Foreign Review in 1829. 53.  The original reads: ‘Angewandtes, lebendig gewordenes Christenthum war der alte katholische Glaube, die letzte dieſer Gestalten.’ 54. For an influential approach, see Miller (1989). 55. On irony in Sartor Resartus, see Haney (1978).

Works Cited Alxinger, Johann Baptist von. 1784. Sämmtliche Poetische Schriften, ed. Paul Malvieux and Anton von Weinkopf. Leipzig: [s.n.]. Anon. 1811. Memoirs of the Wernerian History Society, vol. I. Edinburgh: Bell et al. Baader, Franz von. 1857. Biographie und Briefwechsel, ed. Franz Hoffmann. Vol 15 of Sämtlichte Werke, 16 vols. Leipzig: Verlag von Herrmann Bethmann. Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, J. 1895. M. Victor Cousin, sa vie et sa correspondance, 3 vols. Paris: Hachette. Beiser, Frederick. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Carlyle, Thomas. 1881. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd, 2 vols. London: W.H. Allen & Co.

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———. 1897. The Complete Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Traill, 30 vols. New York: P. F. Collier & Sons. ———. 1973. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 1: 1812–21, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1974a. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 3: 1824–25, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1974b. Two Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle, ed. John Clubbe. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 1976. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 4: 1826–28, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1977. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Vol. 5: January 1829–September 1831, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 8: January 1835–June 1836, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1987. Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry Sweeney and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. Two Note Books, ed. Charles Eliot Norton. New York: Grolier Club. Christie, William. 2009. The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain. London: Pickering & Chatto. Class, Monika. 2012. Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817. London: Bloomsbury. Clubbe, John. 1971. John Carlyle in Germany and the Genesis of Sartor Resartus. In Romantic and Victorian, ed. W. Paul Elledge and Richard L. Hoffman, 264–289. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Cockburn, Henry. 1852. Life of Lord Jeffrey, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. ———. 1856. Memorials of His Time. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Coleridge, S.T. 1984. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coleridge, S.T. 1998. Marginalia IV. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 12, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cousin, Victor. 1833. Fragments Philosophiques, 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum.

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den Otter, Sandra. 1996. British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dibble, Jerry A. 1978. The Pythia’s Drunken Song: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and the Style Problem in German Idealist Philosophy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1972. Sartor Resartus: Philosophical Conflict, Positive and Negative Eras and Personal Resolution, trans. Murray Baumgarten and Evelyn Kanes. CLIO 1 (3): 40–60. Engels, Friedrich. 1975. The Condition of England. In Marx Engels Collected Works, 3: 444–468, 50 vols. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Fichte, J.G. 1965. Werke 1793–1795. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band I.2, ed. Hans Jacob and Reinhard Lauth. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. ———. 1970. Werke 1797–1798. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band I.4, ed. Hans Gliwitzky and Reinhard Lauth. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. ———. 1982. The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flügel, Ewald. 1891. Thomas Carlyle’s Moral and Religious Development, trans. Jessica Gilbert Tyler. New York: M.L. Holbrook & Co. Friday, Jonathan. 2005. Dugald Stewart on Reid, Kant and the Refutation of Idealism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (2): 263–286. Gérando, Joseph Marie de. 1804. Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, 4 vols. Paris: Henrichs. Gillies, R.P. 1851. Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley. Gray, Erik Irving. 2005. The Poetry of Indifference. Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hamilton, William. 1829. Review of Cousin’s Cours de Philosophie. Edinburgh Review 50: 194–221. ———. 1830. Review of Thomas Reid’s Œuvres Completes. Edinburgh Review 52: 158–207. ———. 1833. Review of Recent Publications on Logical Science. Edinburgh Review 57: 194–238. ———. 1840. Fragments de philosophie, trans. Louis Peisse. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1852. Discussions on Philosophy and Literature. London: Longmans. ———. 1860. Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, ed. H.L. Mansel and John Veitch, 4 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwoods. ——— (ed.). 1863. The Works of Thomas Reid, 2 vols, 6th ed. Edinburgh: Maclaghlan and Stewart. Haney, Janice L. 1978. “Shadow-Hunting”: Romantic Irony, “Sartor Resartus”, and Victorian Romanticism. Studies in Romanticism 17 (3): 307–333.

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Harrold, C.F. 1934. Carlyle and German Thought, 1819–1834. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1970. Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany: SUNY Press. Heffer, Simon. 1995. Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Jessop, Ralph. 1997. Carlyle and Scottish Thought. London: Macmillan. Kaplan, Fred. 1983. Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuehn, Manfred. 1987. Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Maimon, Salomon. 1798. Die philosophische Sprachverwirrung. Philosophische Journal 7: 213–258. McCosh, James. 1875. The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical. London: Macmillan. Miller, J. Hillis. 1989. “Hieroglyphical Truth” in Sartor Resartus: Carlyle and the Language of Parable. In Victorian Perspectives, ed. John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier, 1–20. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morley, Edith J. 1929. Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800–1805. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Napier, Macvey. 1879. Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, ed. Macvey Napier. London: Macmillan. Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg. 1826. Schriften, ed. Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich von Schlegel, 2 vols. Berlin: Reimer. ———. 1982. Schriften, Das philosophische Werk 1, ed. Richard Samuel ad Gerhard Schulz. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. ———. 1996. Christianity or Europe. In The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, trans. Frederick Beiser, 59–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Fichte Studies, trans. Jane Kneller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orsini, Gian N.G. 1969. Coleridge and German Idealism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Plutarch. 1936. Moralia, trans. F.C. Babbitt, 15 vols. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Rabb, J. Douglas. 1989. The Silence of Thomas Carlyle. ELN 26 (3): 70–81. Ritchie, D.G. (ed.). 1894. Germany in 1826: Extracts from a Diary of the Late Rev. David Aitken. Scottish Review 24: 106–125.

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Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London: Macmillan. Schelling, F.W.J. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 1988. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2004. First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Pearson. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2006. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press. Schlegel, Frederick [Karl Wilhelm Friedrich]. 1818. Lectures on the History of Literature, trans. John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Stabler, Jane. 2002. Against Their Better Selves: Byron, Jeffrey and the Edinburgh. In British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu, 146–167. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stafford, Fiona. 2002. The Edinburgh Review and the Representation of Scotland. In British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Massimiliano Demata and Wu Duncan, 33–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stapfer, P.A. 1827. Probleme de l’esprit humain. Revue Encyclopedique 33: 414–431. Stewart, Dugald. 1854–1860. The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton and John Veitch, 11 vols. Edinburgh: Constable. Vater, Michael G., and David W. Wood (eds.). 2012. The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondences. Albany: SUNY Press. Veitch, John. 1864. Memoir of Sir William Hamilton. Edinburgh: Blackwood. ———. 1882. Hamilton. Edinburgh: Blackwoods. Vida, Elizabeth M. 1993. Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Vijn, Jacob Peter. 1982. Carlyle and Jean Paul: Their Spiritual Optics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wellek, René. 1931. Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1965. Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations Between Germany, England, and the United States During the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Wheeler, Katherine. 1980. Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiteley, Giles. 2018. “Tenebrific Constellations”: Carlyle, Addison and Burns. N&Q (September). Wordsworth, William. 2007. The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wu, Duncan. 2002. Rancour and Rabies: Hazlitt, Coleridge and Jeffrey in Dialogue. In British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu, 168–194. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zeydel, Edwin H. 1931. Ludwig Tieck and England. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Plagiarism Controversy

The early Scottish reception, discussed in the last chapter, helps us to contextualize the plagiarism controversy, one of the most important moments in the history of Schelling’s nineteenth century British reception. The ground laid by Hamilton had started to precipitate a change in the philosophical climate north of the border, establishing the beginnings of a new Scottish school, one which sought to wed the common sense tradition of Reid with insights drawn from Germany. These Scottish critics became better equipped than many colleagues south of the border to spot Coleridge’s ‘borrowings’ from Schelling. Beginning only a few months after Coleridge’s death in 1834, the charges of plagiarism levelled by these critics gradually increased in seriousness and import as the century progressed. Moreover, these publications set the new Scottish critical tradition against a predominantly English defence of Coleridge. These rhetorical strategies served either to dismiss Coleridge and Schelling alike as mystics, or alternatively, to begin to divorce the name ‘Schelling’, and the philosophy he was supposed to represent, from Coleridge, and thereby from the discourse of British Romanticism. The plagiarism controversy has continued to haunt Coleridge studies, posing questions not simply about exactly how much he had plagiarised from Schelling, but, more significantly, about how original Coleridge was as a thinker. As Wellek put it, what was at stake was ‘not simply a question of plagiarism or even of direct dependence on German

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sources, though these cannot be easily dismissed or shirked as it has been the custom of a good many writers on Coleridge to do’ (1981: 151–152). In the twentieth century, the problem posed by Coleridge’s plagiarism was neither an ‘ethical issue’ nor a ‘psychological problem’ (1981: 151–152), as it was for many of his nineteenth-century readers, but a deeper question regarding ‘the over-rating of Coleridge’s philosophical thought’ (1931: 68). For Wellek, the plagiarism controversy revealed Coleridge’s ‘fundamental lack of real philosophical originality’ (1931: 66). Wellek’s criticism spurred responses from a new community of Coleridge critics. For Thomas McFarland, ‘the concept of “plagiarism” cannot stand the stress of historical examination. […] It has no proper applicability to the activities, however unconventional, of a powerful, learned, and deeply committed mind’ (1969: 45). On the other hand, Norman Fruman, writing only a year later, took a less charitable approach, returning to the problem of ethics which Wellek had sought to set in parentheses. ‘It has become distinctly unfashionable to speak of literary ethics where important writers are involved, especially poets’, Fruman points out, concluding that the Coleridge case speaks to the fact that the very ‘word “plagiarism” itself’ has become ‘vaguely discredited’ (1971: 70). For better or worse, then, the question of Coleridge’s plagiarism was not simply a debate which raged during the nineteenth century, but was one which would continue to inflect responses to Coleridge, Romanticism and Schelling during the twentieth century. As Michael John Kooy puts it, critics have become marked by a ‘nervous fixation on sources’, leaving them ‘unaccustomed, even unwilling to think of Coleridge’s relationship with other thinkers except in terms of either slavish dependence or absolute ignorance’ (2002: 96).1 I do not propose to fixate nervously on Coleridge’s sources in this chapter, nor do I propose to re-litigate the twentieth-century reception of his plagiarism of Schelling. Indeed, this chapter is only peripherally concerned with Coleridge’s plagiarism itself; rather, it focuses on what the debate over Coleridge’s plagiarism tells us about how Schelling was viewed during the period. It was a debate which would end up framing a number of later nineteenth-century British appreciations of Schelling, with nearly every thinker thereafter paying at least a passing reference to the problem of Coleridge’s plagiarism.

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De Quincey’s Confessions It was Thomas de Quincey who first brought the plagiarism problem to the attention of the wider public in piece occasioned by Coleridge’s death, published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in September 1834, later collected in his Autobiographic Sketches (1853). De Quincey was in a privileged position to identify this ‘case of real and palpable plagiarism’ (2003d: 291): he knew Coleridge personally, he had read widely in post-Kantian German philosophy, and was currently based in Scotland, on intimate terms with Hamilton and his circle. De Quincey had been a sometime friend of Coleridge, seeking his acquaintance as early as Christmas 1804, when he met Charles Lamb (Lindop 1981: 126–129; Morrison 2009: 112–113), but it was not until 1807 that the two would finally meet in person, when de Quincey called on Thomas Poole (1766–1837) in Nether Stowey (Lindop 1981: 141–143; Morrison 2009: 119–121). De Quincey would strike up a friendship with Coleridge, in part owing to their similar interests in transcendental philosophy, that ‘spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, […] yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of truth’ (2003a: 162). In his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), de Quincey states that a few years later, in 1814, he was ‘chiefly studying German metaphysics, in the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, &c’ (2000: 52), later claiming that by 1834 he had ‘read for more than thirty years in the same track in Coleridge’ (2003d: 293). While the depth of de Quincey’s actual acquaintance with post-Kantian philosophy has been disputed (Bridgwater 2004: 33–36), it is perhaps unsurprising on the surface that it would be he who would first reveal the extent of Coleridge’s debt to Schelling, even if de Quincey, himself a notorious plagiarist, was throwing stones from inside a glass house.2 Moreover, he was now a central part of the Edinburgh literary scene—that same scene which had proven such an accommodating ground for Schelling’s Scottish reception. He was friends with Jeffrey and Wilson, who introduced him to Hamilton around 1813 (Lindop 1981: 213–214), and de Quincey would later become a regular attendee at Hamilton’s parties, impressing both the host and Gillies with his knowledge of German literature (Morrison 2009: 174–175). Through Wilson, too, he would come to meet Carlyle (Lindop 1981: 287–288), although the latter noted that at a later party at Hamilton’s in 1828,

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de Quincey was suffering from ‘the low stage of his opium-regimen, and looking rather care-stricken’ (1976: 341). As de Quincey tells the story, it was Poole who first raised the subject of Coleridge’s plagiarism. ‘God never made a creature more divinely endowed’, Poole commented, ‘yet strange to say, sometimes [Coleridge] steals from other people’ (2003d: 289).3 While the instance of plagiarism furnished by Poole to de Quincey was slight, the significance of de Quincey’s operation here was strategic: it allowed him to broach the topic of Coleridge’s plagiarism as being ‘first made known to me by his best friend, and first published to the world by me, the foremost of his admirers’ (2003d: 290). De Quincey’s phrasing draws the syntactic parallel between Poole in 1807 and himself in 1834: he suggests that he is writing under the sign of a similar ‘friendship’, even if he would later seek to dispute this suggestion in a note to his Autobiographic Sketches (2003c: 421).4 In this context, de Quincey gives two reasons for outing Coleridge’s debts to Schelling. First and foremost, he claims that he sought ‘to forestal […] other discoverers who would make a more unfriendly use’ of the material than he would (2003d: 290). In other words, de Quincey frames his intervention as doing a favour to the posthumous reputation of Coleridge, lying fresh in the ground. Secondly, he introduces the charges ‘as matters of literary curiosity’ (2003d: 290). Indeed, what is at stake is more than simply a literary curiosity, but something intrinsically curious in itself: a problem which stubbornly calls into question the poet’s psychological state. To plagiarise Schelling is ‘of a nature quite unaccountable in a man of Coleridge’s attainments’ (2003d: 291), de Quincey points out. De Quincey here is partially dismissive of German philosophy, remarking that Coleridge’s speculations in the Biographia revolve around ‘a subject, which, since the time of Fichte, has much occupied the German metaphysicians; and many thousands of essays have been written on it, of which many hundreds have been read by many tens of persons’ (2003d: 291), a law of diminishing returns which served simultaneously to satirise the pretentions of German idealism. Alluding to Coleridge’s pre-emptive attempt to excuse himself of any points of ‘coincidence’ with Schelling, de Quincey exclaims: After this, what was my astonishment to find that the entire essay, from the first word to the last, is a verbatim translation from Schelling, with no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper by developing the

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arguments or by diversifying the illustrations? […] This was a barefaced plagiarism, which could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and especially of that section of the German literature. (2003d: 292)

In other words, de Quincey imputes a kind of arrogance on Coleridge’s part, one which assumes that the British were not widely read in transcendental philosophy, and in Schelling in particular. De Quincey finds the situation all the more ‘strange’ and curious given a fact that he believes cannot be disputed, namely Coleridge’s greatness as a philosopher in his own right: Had, then, Coleridge any need to borrow from Schelling? Did he borrow in forma pauperis? Not at all: there lay the wonder. He spun daily, and at all hours, for mere amusement of his own activities, and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images such as […] Schelling […] could have emulated in his dreams. With the riches of El Dorado lying about him, he would condescend to filch a handful of gold from any man whose purse he fancied. (2003d: 292)

The point is significant: even given the fact that Coleridge had plagiarised Schelling, de Quincey still considers the British thinker to be the greater of the two. Reminding his readers of his own innocent motives, ‘that I might anticipate and […] prevent the uncandid interpretation of its meaning’ (2003d: 292–293), de Quincey asserts that he ‘most heartily’ believed Coleridge ‘to have been as entirely original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man who ever has existed’ (2003d: 293). It is this claim, both of the originality of his philosophy, and of the relative status of Coleridge and Schelling as major philosophical forces, one prioritising the claims of the Englishman over his German contemporary, which the Scottish critics who would follow de Quincey would be less convinced of.

Julius Hare and the Initial English Response While de Quincey’s motives became an almost instantaneous point of contention, there is little question that his attack was blunted by his professed admiration for Coleridge. Moreover, any potential blows to Coleridge’s reputation were somewhat ameliorated by the slapdash

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nature of the initial volleys. De Quincey had admitted in a footnote to having forgotten ‘the exact title’ from which Coleridge plagiarised, ‘having not seen the book since 1823, and then only for one day; but I believe it was Schelling’s Kleine Philosophische Werke’ (2003d: 292 n.). The title from which Coleridge drew was the Philosophische Schriften, and de Quincey’s sloppiness was one which Coleridge’s defenders caught hold of in order to plead the case for the defence. Less than a year after de Quincey’s initial piece appeared, Julius Charles Hare offered the first published repost in the British Magazine. Duly attacking the ‘audacious carelessness’ (1835: 19) of the opium-eater, Hare seemed not to note the irony that his defence was grounded on Coleridge’s own carelessness, his ‘notoriously inattentive’ memory, explaining away any possible lapses in ‘propriety’. Hare acquitted Coleridge of ‘all suspicion of “ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism”’ (1835: 21). We will discuss Hare in more detail in Chapter 6, but it is worth noting from the outset his significance as a respondent on a topic related to Coleridge or Schelling. Hare had been friends with Coleridge, holding him to be ‘the true sovereign of modern English thought’ (Sterling 1848: 1: xiv), and had actually met Schelling personally in 1832 when he travelled to Germany (Hare 1872: 458). Coming less than three years after this meeting, Hare’s defence of Coleridge thus takes on added significance. For Hare, de Quincey’s essay revealed more about its author than about Coleridge. De Quincey was an irredeemable narcissist, unable to allow his ‘generous self-love to wean him from the idolatry of his own talents’ (1835: 15). While Hare admits that ‘no one is so well qualified, from his own studies and pursuits’, to track Coleridge ‘along the endless meanderings of his all-embracing speculations’ (1835: 15), this was less down to de Quincey’s philosophical expertise as the slavish debt his own worked owed to Coleridge’s. There is a kind of anxiety of influence at work here, Hare suggests, a credible point, although he passes over in silence the way in which such an anxiety also underwrites Coleridge’s own discussion of his ‘coincidences’ with Schelling. For Hare, the ‘influence that Coleridge has exerted on the shaping’ of de Quincey’s mind ‘haunt[ed] him like a spell’ (1835: 15), so that the outing of Coleridge’s plagiarism is read as a kind of displaced exercise in self-exorcism. The allegations of plagiarism are contextualised alongside the wider tone of de Quincey’s article. He had ‘betrayed’ Coleridge’s ‘friendship’ (1835: 16), and the credibility of his allegations needed to be

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weighed against the pecuniary motives of the opportunist who had written them. Hare finds the timing, coming ‘before the sound of his knell had died away’ (1835: 19), inexcusable. For Hare, de Quincey’s ‘slovenly rashness of assertion’ (1835: 19) did violence to Coleridge, who had done Schelling a service: ‘the high praise which Coleridge bestows on Schelling’, Hare argues, ‘would naturally excite a wish in such of his readers as felt an interest in philosophy to know more of the great German’ (1835: 20). Hare’s response to de Quincey is one of ‘disgust’ at the desecration of a grave, that ‘marble monument sacred to the memory of the departed great’ (1835: 25). Hare concludes by wondering how Coleridge himself would have felt at seeing de Quincey’s ‘eminent powers and knowledge […] employed in ministering to the wretched love of gossip’, ‘creeping into the secret chambers of great men’s houses, to filch out materials for tattle’ (1835: 27). Hare pulls no punches in damning de Quincey, ‘whose talents [Coleridge] admired, with whom he had lived familiarly, and whom he had honoured with friendship’ (1835: 27). A few months after Hare’s article appeared, Coleridge’s family began to have their say. In his preface to his edition of Coleridge’s Table Talk, the poet’s nephew, Henry Nelson (1798–1843), attacked de Quincey’s ‘incredible meanness of thought, allusion, or language’ (1835: 1: xl). In a paralipsis, Henry waved objections to the ‘apparent improbability’ (1: xliv) of de Quincey having remembered verbatim dialogue which had taken place some twenty-eight years beforehand, focusing his defence again on Coleridge’s inattentive ‘passive memory’ (1: xlix). He quotes Hare at length (1: liii–lxv), concluding that Coleridge was, after all, but ‘a frail mortal’, displaying ‘peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers’ (1: lxx). Less forgiving, however, was John Herman Merivale (1779–1844), barrister and friend of Lord Byron, in his review of the Table Talk. While Merivale was an Englishman, his response to the controversy sided with the Scots and was published in the Edinburgh Review in April 1835. He noted disapprovingly the plagiarisms which ‘are, we fear, common enough throughout Coleridge’s work’ (1835: 147). Indeed, the controversy even made its way over the Atlantic, with Andrews Norton (1786–1853), Unitarian preacher and father of Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), discussing the debate as a matter of significance in his 1839 article introducing German ‘Transcendentalism’ to American audiences (1840: 25–27).

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James Frederick Ferrier and the Scottish Attack If we believe de Quincey’s version of events, he had first heard of Coleridge’s plagiarism from Poole, suggesting that it was something of an open secret. Certainly, de Quincey himself appears to have been gossiping about it well before his article in Tait’s in 1834, as we can surmise from one of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ dating from some eleven years beforehand. This series of seventy-one imaginary colloquies, published in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1822 to 1835, was written primarily by Wilson, with input from Lockhard and Hogg. In the ‘Noctes’ of October 1823, Wilson parodies de Quincey attacking Coleridge: His genius none will dispute; but I have traced him through German literature, poetry, and philosophy; and he is, sir, not only a plagiary, but, sir, a thief, a bonâ fide most unconscientious thief. I mean no disrespect to a man of surpassing talents. Strip him of his stolen goods, and you will find good clothes of his own below. Yet, except as a poet, he is not original; […] Coleridge has stolen from a whole host of his fellow-creatures, most of them poorer than himself; and I pledge myself I am bound over to appear against him. […] If he stand mute, I will press him to death, under three hundred and fifty pound weight of German metaphysics. (1823: 383)

Wilson’s language anticipates Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in the imagery of the philosopher clothed, and expresses Poole’s and de Quincey’s disbelief that Coleridge would steal from fellow writers ‘poorer than himself’. And while he does not directly mention him by name here, we can assume that it is to Schelling who Wilson, at least party, refers. He knew de Quincey well by this point, the two having met in 1802 in the Lake District (Morrison 2009: 137), with Wilson the person who had first introduced him to the Scottish literary scene. While de Quincey was the first to bring to public attention the subject of Coleridge’s plagiarism from Schelling, it would be Wilson’s nephew, James Frederick Ferrier, who would supply scholarly rigour and a more dispassionate critical stance.5 Ferrier had been educated at Edinburgh and Magdalen, before returning to Edinburgh in 1832. There he became friends with Hamilton and travelled to Germany in 1834, visiting Heidelberg, Leipsig and Berlin (Haldane 1899: 27–33). Upon his return, Ferrier became Hamilton’s most prodigiously brilliant follower,

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announcing his own philosophy in ‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1838. The essay, developed from the Scottish common sense school, takes in Hume and Reid, but makes no mention of Kant, Fichte or Hegel. Instead, it is Schelling’s Vom Ich which Ferrier quoted approvingly: ‘arouse man to the consciousness of what he is, and he will soon learn to be what he ought’ (1838: 191; quoting SW I.1, 157; HKA I.2, 77–78). Ferrier’s project was to introduce ‘German Philosophy, refracted through an alien Scottish medium’, as de Quincey later summarised it (2001: 254), and it was clear that foremost in his thinking was Schelling. If Ferrier eventually expressed his frustrations over Schelling’s ‘silence’, he continued to maintain as late as the year that Schelling died that ‘no man’ was better placed than the German ‘to show that Speculation is not all one “barren heath”’ (1854: 91). Indeed, when Ferrier came to state his mature philosophy in his Institutes of Metaphysics (1854), he remarked that his first proposition—the ‘primary law or condition’ of epistemology that any intelligence ‘must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some knowledge of itself’ (1854: 75)—was an idea he derived from the early philosophy of Schelling (1854: 91). Two years after announcing himself in his article on the ‘Philosophy of Consciousness’, Ferrier published an essay on ‘The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge’ in Blackwood’s. He begins by attacking both de Quincey’s and Hare’s respective articles, which were ‘altogether bungled’ since ‘neither party appears to have possessed a competent knowledge of the facts’ (1840: 287). The claim of amateurism, of course, was one which Hare himself had levelled at de Quincey, but Ferrier’s assertion takes on added gravitas considering the fact that both of these previous authors were readers of Schelling, and that Hare had heard Schelling lecture and met him personally. Ferrier seems to suggest that only he, as a rigorous scholar of the Hamiltonian school, was in an adequate position to evaluate the debts Coleridge owed to Schelling. His attack was launched on two grounds, literary and moral, and he sought to demonstrate how one of the most distinguished English authors of the nineteenth century, at the mature age of forty-five, succeeding in founding by far the greater part of his metaphysical reputation […] upon verbatim plagiarism from works written and published by a German youth, when little more than twenty years of age! (1840: 288)

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This, then, is the moral crime according to Ferrier: what is at stake is not simply plagiarism, but the way in which plagiarism established Coleridge’s central and lasting reputation as a philosophical force in his own right. The plagiarism is not, Ferrier reminds us, a question of ‘similarity: it is absolute sameness of phrase’ (1840: 289). Taking issue with Coleridge’s language of having ‘toiled’ out the same ground as Schelling (1984: 1: 160), Ferrier retorts that Coleridge ‘left the whole of the toil to Schelling’, his own role limited to ‘render[ing], page after page, into very tolerable English, some of the profound speculations of the German thinker’ (1840: 291). ‘It is Schelling and not Coleridge we are reading’, Ferrier continues, and his analysis constantly draws attention to the ways in which Coleridge did ‘not act fairly towards his reader’, how his turn of phrase conveyed ‘an impression altogether false, erroneous, and misleading’ (1840: 291). Take Coleridge’s parenthetical aside in the following sentence: ‘To render unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling on a like occasion, is honour and a good name before God and man’ (1984: 1: 244). Quoting Coleridge, Ferrier’s ire is palpable: ‘Exclaims Schelling on a like occasion! – why, this is the very occasion upon which Schelling utters that exclamation’ (1840: 295; compare SW I.1, 442–443; HKA I.4, 169). As such, Ferrier argues that Coleridge does not simply plagiarise Schelling, but in framing his language in such a way as to obfuscate the distinctions between his own ideas and those of the German, the case was one of ‘plagiarism out-plagiarised’ (1840: 295). There are two further points of interest in the article. It was Ferrier (1840: 294) who first drew attention to the fact that the apparent neologism ‘esemplastic’, a word which Coleridge claimed to have ‘constructed […] myself from the Greek words, εἰς ἓν πλάττειν i.e. to shape into one’ (1984: 1: 168), was taken from Schelling’s Darlegung (SW I.7, 60). De Quincey, stung by the rebuke of Ferrier (curious given his later support for Ferrier for the Edinburgh Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1852), would reply to this apparent oversight in his Autobiographic Sketches, but somewhat unconvincingly. ‘I had not overlooked the case of esemplastic’, he maintains: ‘I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press, and want of room, obliged me to omit a good deal’ (2003c: 420). The point, however, is of more importance given that Coleridge’s theory ‘On the imagination, or esemplastic power’ was supposed to constitute the culmination of his philosophical aesthetics. This leads to the most severe claim served up by Ferrier, working without access to the Opus Maximus, and so unable to evaluate the extent to which these posthumously

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published fragments might stake a claim for Coleridge’s philosophical originality. For Ferrier, Schelling’s long ‘silence’ in publication helpfully explained the limitations of Coleridge’s theory of the imagination as it was delineated in the Biographia: Interspersed throughout the works of Schelling, glimpses and indications are to be found of some stupendous theory on the subject of the imagination [which] Coleridge expected to be able to catch and unriddle; but after proceeding a certain length in his work, he found himself unable to do so. When he came to try, he found himself incompetent to think out the theory which the German philosopher had left enveloped in shadows, […]; and not being able to swim in transcendental depths without Schelling’s bladders, […] he had nothing else for it but to abandon his work altogether, and leave his readers in the lurch. […] Had Schelling been more explicit and tangible on the subject of the imagination, Coleridge would have been so too. Had Schelling fully worked out his theory, Coleridge would have done the same; and we should have had the discovery of the German thinker paraded, for upwards of twenty years, as a specimen of the wonderful powers of the English philosopher. (1840: 296)

Ferrier’s language is damning: the imagery is of Coleridge out of his depth without Schelling’s assistance. Indeed, in italicising Coleridge’s incompetence ‘to think out the theory’, Ferrier suggests that the great poet-prophet was nothing more than a scrivener, comfortable writing down the thoughts of other men, but unable to conceive an original speculation of his own. Ferrier’s image of Coleridge is less of Carlyle’s ‘sage’ (1897: 11: 52–53), than of Nemo, Dickens’ opium-addled clerk from Bleak House (1852–1853).

The Final Blows: Hamilton, Stirling, Ingleby and Robertson Ferrier’s attack was comprehensive: there seemed no place left for Coleridge or his apologists to take cover. In 1846, Hamilton augmented the case for the prosecution in his Dissertation on Thomas Reid, itemising a few more examples of Coleridge’s plagiarism from the Abhandlungen (1846: 890; compare SW I.1, 403–404; HKA I.4, 130–131). He comments approvingly, with a kind of avuncular pleasure, on Ferrier’s paper, ‘remarkable for the sagacity which tracks […] the literary reaver’, with Hamilton twisting the knife by concluding that it was

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Coleridge’s ‘ignorance of French alone which freed France from contribution’ (1846: 890). The following year, some twelve years after Coleridge’s nephew first began to reply to the charges of plagiarism on behalf of the family, the most detailed defence of the poet to date was undertaken by his daughter, Sara Coleridge (1802–1852), in her edition of the Biographia Literaria. Rejecting Ferrier’s portrait of her father ‘as an artful purloiner and selfish plunderer, who knowingly robs others to enrich himself’ (1847: 1: vi), her defence was launched on the grounds of intention. ‘No man can properly be said to defraud another […] who has not a fraudulent intention’ (1847: 1: vii), she argues, holding that Ferrier’s case remained unproven. Like Hare before her, she paints a picture of Coleridge as absent-minded in matters of the practical world, ‘not always sufficiently considerate of other men’s property’ and ‘profuse of his own’ (1847: 1: xviii). To claim that ‘he stopped short in the process of unfolding a theory of the imagination, merely because he had come to the end of all Schelling had taught concerning it, […] is to place the matter in a perfectly false light’ (1847: 1: xxi), she argues, and for all her obvious bias, to her credit she had taken the charges seriously, trawling through Schelling’s German in order to find Coleridge’s sources, and consulting two of Schelling’s students. ‘I suspect’, she continues, ‘that this “stupendous theory” has its habitation in the clouds of the accuser’s fancy, – clouds without water, though black as if they were big with showers of rain’ (1847: 1: xxii; alluding to Jude 1:13). Indeed, Sara Coleridge takes issue with Ferrier’s close reading of her father’s language, and with his intentions, saying that ‘in order to find full matter of accusation against him, he puts into his words a great deal which they do not of themselves contain’ (1847: 1: xxvi). Noting the differences that separated Coleridge and Schelling, particularly in their religious philosophy (1847: 1: xxviii), Sara Coleridge was far more happy to entertain uncritically the idea of the ‘coincidental’ in her father’s narrative than the Scottish critics had been (1847: 1: xxx–xxxiii). Ferrier, she concluded, was a man determined to read Coleridge’s ‘apologies the wrong way, as witches say their prayers backward’; he was one ‘who hatches a grand project for Schelling in order to bring [Coleridge] in guilty of a design to steal it’ (1847: 1: xxxviii). Ultimately, however, Sara Coleridge’s defence rested primarily on good faith. In the absence of any decisive evidence, she resorts to the exclamation that such charges as Ferrier had levelled ‘never have been

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or will be believed by the generous and intelligent’ (1847: 1: xxxviii). In point of fact, they were and continued to be believed widely. Indeed, the very fact that the defence of her father spanned some forty-eight pages of her preface, over a quarter of its total length, suggests the significance that the controversy continued to have in the minds of mid-nineteenthcentury readers. And while de Quincey would opine two years later, and seemingly without even a hint of irony, that ‘far too much ha[d] been made’ of Coleridge’s plagiarism (2003b: 56), the topic continued to fascinate readers. It was a controversy which was at once salacious and of major scholarly significance. As the poet and East India Company officer, David Lester Richardson (1801–1865), remarked in 1848, ‘the general impression in both England and Germany [was] against’ Coleridge (1848: 151). De Quincey, whose contribution to the debate had been characterised by Hare as a form of grave robbery, reflected on how Coleridge found himself ‘compelled for a secular period to banquet on carrion with ghouls, or on the spoils of vivisection, with vampires’ (2003b: 58). Nor was he permitted to rest after the respective contributions of Hamilton and his daughter. Nearly two decades later, a new wave of attacks on Coleridge were launched, again from north of the border. This time, however, no longer was the question of plagiarism at stake, but a broader question as to whether or not Coleridge understood the German whose thought he claimed to ‘anticipate’. It was James Hutchison Stirling (1820–1909) who would take up the question afresh. Stirling had long held literary aspirations, writing to Carlyle in 1840 and again in 1842 for advice (Carlyle 1984: 149–150; 1986: 14–17), and the influence of Carlyle’s style was palpable in Stirling’s influential book, The Secret of Hegel (1865). In the course of contextualising Hegel’s thought, Stirling breaks off to interject that if ‘Schelling has been said to resemble Coleridge’, this misunderstands the order of their priority: Coleridge, exquisite poet, was, with all his logosophy, no philosopher; and it is difficult to believe even that there is any single philosopher in the world whom he had either thoroughly studied or thoroughly understood. Schelling had both studied and originated philosophy. [Schelling] was infinitely clearer [than Coleridge], infinitely more vigorous, infinitely richer, and more elastic in the spontaneity of original suggestion and thought. (1865: 1: 28)

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Addressing in a footnote ‘the ostrich-like devices’ by which Coleridge had ‘sought to efface his own footsteps’, Stirling vividly attacks all parties, dismissing de Quincey’s article as nothing more than a ‘brilliant rant which suited the period’ (1865: 1: 29), before returning to the question of whether Coleridge or Schelling was the more deserving of their nineteenth-century reputation. ‘Coleridge superior to Schelling!’, Stirling exclaims in incredulity: ‘Why, Schelling really effected something […] something that has historically functioned, and still historically functions. But what has Coleridge effected? Aught else than fragmentary poetry [and the] fragmentary criticism of poetry’ (1865: 1: 29). Stirling returned to the topic in an article on ‘De Quincey and Coleridge upon Kant’, published in the Fortnightly, two years later. Taking issue with the common assumption that that ‘on matters German, De Quincey is usually admitted to be a master’ (1867: 377), Stirling maintains that he did not fully understand Kant, and nor, for that matter, did Coleridge. Both authors, he argues, were symptomatic of the times and of the fact that ‘the strict historical connection of the German philosophers was not then well understood in England’ (1867: 387). Casting doubt on Coleridge’s version of events in the Biographia, Stirling points out that ‘the comparison of a few historical dates will put these things in a very curious light’ (1867: 388). While Coleridge maintains that his philosophy might have been ‘written down many years before [Schelling’s] pamphlet was given to the world’ (1984: 1: 147), this means that they would have had to have originated some time before the Ideen was published in 1797, dating even to ‘many years before Fichte (the first sketch of whose system dates only from 1794)’, and to ‘many years before he knew Kant, or had even learnt German’ (1867: 388). This Stirling finds implausible, but even assuming Coleridge had misremembered the dates, it would mean that Coleridge would have had to have evolved a system from Kant to Schelling without the intervention of Fichte (1867: 388–389), with his superficial understanding of the latter testified to by the brevity of his presentation in the Biographia (1984: 157–158), although, in point of fact, Coleridge did know his Fichte, as we saw in Chapter 2.6 But the version of events which Coleridge had portrayed in the Biographia was claimed by Stirling to be not simply implausible, but impossible: a basic understanding of the history of post-Kantian German philosophy damned any claims Coleridge might have made to the contrary. Three years later, another one of Hamilton’s followers, the lawyer and Shakespearean

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scholar Clement Mansfield Ingleby (1823–1886), returned to the same ground. ‘Coleridge was a poet’, Ingleby maintained, but not a philosopher, for while ‘much in Coleridge’s works is suggestive, stimulating, striking’, ‘poetry that goes no further than that is but inchoate philosophy’ (1870: 404). For Ingleby, ‘Coleridge never thoroughly understood Schelling’ (1870: 406),7 and in his damning estimate, the ‘poetical vagueness of vast possibilities’ which seemed to be promised by his reading of Schelling, but which was, he claimed, ill-understood by Coleridge, ‘comforted him with the impression that he had achieved something great’ (1870: 406). It was left to another Scot, John Mackinnon Robertson (1856–1933), journalist and later Liberal M. P., to have the final say on the plagiarism controversy of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1897, Robinson calls Coleridge a ‘pathological’ case (1897: 147), and expresses his amazement that ‘Coleridge won and for a time kept his philosophic prestige despite of his being convicted of plagiarisms unparalleled in literary history’ (1897: 154). The claims of ‘coincidence’, Robinson remarks, should be treated as simply ‘hallucinations’ (1897: 154), his language fittingly anticipating the psychoanalytic approach which later critics such as John Livingston Lowes (1927) would adopt when attempting to explain Coleridge’s plagiarism.8 What had begun as simply a matter of ‘literary curiosity’ became, as the century progressed, a question of national pride and of the respective statuses enjoyed by both Coleridge and Schelling in nineteenth-century literary culture. Indeed, this debate, centred in Britain and conducted mainly by critics either originating from Scotland or identifying with Hamilton’s new Scottish school, even made its way to Germany, with Schelling himself eventually weighing in in Coleridge’s support, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Notes 1. For more on Coleridge’s plagiarism, see McFarland (1969: 1–52), Fruman (1971: 69–107), Vardy (2010: 38–48), and Keanie (2012). One important example of a critic who has sought to think through Coleridge’s relationship with Schelling without resorting to ‘terms of either slavish dependence or absolute ignorance’ is Hamilton (2007: 121–139), who argues that the way in which Coleridge’s thought developed is comparable to Schelling’s during the period of the latter’s ‘silence’. 2. On de Quincey’s own plagiarism, see Clej (1995: 212–231).

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3. Poole himself would later dispute de Quincey’s recollection of the events: ‘It must be incorrect; for as I never considered Coleridge a plagiarist, I could never have said what he has given me’ (quoted in Lindop 1981: 142). 4. In this later note, de Quincey writes: ‘I never lived in such intercourse with Coleridge as to give me an opportunity of becoming his friend. To him I owed nothing at all’ (2003c: 421). There is a sense of uncanny déjà vu in the phrasing and italicization here, suggesting yet another anxiety of influence—whether consciously or not, de Quincey’s language recalls Coleridge’s own preemptive defense of his plagiarism in the Biographia Literaria: ‘He needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude’ (1984: 1: 161). 5. On Ferrier, see Davie (2003). 6. Stirling, of course, did not have the evidence of Coleridge’s marginalia to hand, which shows his detailed reading of Fichte. The relative omission of Fichte from the narrative Coleridge constructs in the Biographia Literaria is, as we saw in Chapter 2, likely strategic. 7. Ingleby refers in passing to Die Weltalter (1870: 405), given in his text its now standard English title of The Ages of the World. Ingeby may have encountered the name of the text in Stirling’s recent translation of Albert Schwegler’s Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriss (1848) [Handbook of the History of Philosophy] (1868: 310), published two years earlier, which was the first time that Die Weltalter (first published in German in 1861) was given this English title. 8.  See Mazzeo (2007: 46–48) for another psychoanalytic approach to Coleridge’s plagiarism.

Works Cited Bridgwater, Patrick. 2004. De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade. Amsterdam: Rodolpi. Carlyle, Thomas. 1897. The Complete Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Traill, 30 vols. New York: P. F. Collier & Sons. ———. 1976. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 4: 1826–28, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1984. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 12: 1840, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1986. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 14: January-July 1842, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Clej, Alina. 1995. A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1835. Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H.N. Coleridge, 2 vols. London: John Murray. ———. 1847. Biographia Literaria, ed. Sara Coleridge, 2 vols. London: W. Pickering. ———. 1984. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davie, George. 2003. Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review. De Quincey, Thomas. 2000. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821–1856, ed. Grevel Lindop. Vol. 2 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. Testimonial of J.F. Ferrier. In Articles from Hogg’s Instructor and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1850–2, ed. Edmund Baxter, 255–260. Vol. 17 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. ———. 2003a. Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater. In Articles from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1834–8, ed. Alina Clej, 159–211. Vol. 10 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. ———. 2003b. Conversation and S.T. Coleridge. In Transcripts of Unlocated Manuscripts, ed. Grevel Lindop, 42–70. Vol. 21 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. ———. 2003c. Note [on Coleridge’s Plagiarisms]. In Autobiographic Sketches, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, 420–422. Vol. 19 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. ———. 2003d. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Articles from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1834–8, ed. Alina Clej, 287–347. Vol. 10 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. Ferrier, James Frederick. 1838. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness. Blackwood’s Magazine 43: 187–201. ———. 1840. The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge. Blackwood’s Magazine 47: 287–299. ———. 1854. Institutes of Metaphysics: The Theory of Knowing and Being. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Fruman, Norman. 1971. Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel. London: George Allen & Unwin. Haldane, E.S. 1899. James Frederick Ferrier. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier. Hamilton, William, ed. 1846. The Works of Thomas Reid, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart & Co. Hare, Augustus J. 1872. Memorials of a Quiet Life, Volume 1, 2nd ed. London: Strahan & Co.

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Hare, Julius. 1835. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Opium-Eater. British Magazine 7: 15–27. Ingleby, C.M. 1870. On Some Points Connected with the Philosophy of Coleridge. Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature 9: 396–429. Keanie, Andrew. 2012. Coleridge and Plagiarism. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick, 435–454. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kooy, John Michael. 2002. Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lindop, Grevel. 1981. The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. London: J. M. Dent. Lowes, John Livingston. 1927. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Mazzeo, Tilar J. 2007. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McFarland, Thomas. 1969. Coleridge and the Pantheistic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merivale, John Herman. [Anon.]. 1835. Review of Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edinburgh Review 61: 129–153. Morrison, Robert. 2009. The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Norton, Andrews. 1840. Two Articles from the Princeton Review Concerning the Transcendental Philosophy of the Germans and Cousin. Cambridge, MA: J. Owen. Richardson, David Lester. 1848. Literary Chit-Chat. London: James Madden. Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv. 2000. Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Robertson, John Mackinnon. 1897. New Essays Towards a Critical Method. London: John Lane. Schelling, F.W.J. 1974. HKA. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Jörg Jantzen, and Hermann Krings, 40 vols. Stuttgart: Freidrich Frommann. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher. Schwegler, Albert. 1868. Handbook of the History of Philosophy, trans. James Hutchinson Stirling. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas. Sterling, John. 1848. Essays and Tales, ed. J.C. Hare. London: John W. Parker. Stirling, James Hutchison. 1865. The Secret of Hegel, 2 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green. ———. 1867. De Quincey and Coleridge Upon Kant. Fortnightly Review 7: 377–397.

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Vardy, Alan D. 2010. Constructing Coleridge: The Posthumous Life of the Author. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wellek, René. 1931. Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981. A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950: Volume 2, The Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Schelling in Berlin

Beginning his first lecture on the Philosophy of Revelation at the University of Berlin, 15 November 1841, Schelling seemingly accepted the symbolic significance of his appearance, then and there: ‘I feel the whole significance [Bedeutung] of this moment. I know what I am taking upon me [and] what is uttered and declared by my very appearance [Erscheinung] in this place’ (SW II.4, 357; 1843: 398). The fact that Schelling was finally in Berlin was an important point, the significance of which he well understood: he had been called to serve both the new King of Prussia, Frederick William IV (1795–1861), and thereby the nation. Hegel had died in 1831, but his influence continued to dominate contemporary politics, theology and society through his followers. Schelling had been called to Berlin to banish this specter. As Friedrich Engels puts it in his appropriately millenarian pamphlet on ‘Schelling and Revelation’ (1842), he was ‘the St. George who was to slay the dreadful dragon of Hegelianism, which breathed the fire of godlessness and the smoke of obscuration!’ (1975a: 192) This chapter briefly contextualises these lectures, their significance and reception, before addressing the British reception of these events in the press and periodicals from the period and considering the response of some of those British figures who travelled to hear Schelling lecture in Berlin in person.

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The Organ of the Nation Frederick William IV had been crowned King of Prussia in 1840, taking on the role from his father, Frederick William III (1770–1840). As the crown prince, the young William had watched as his father, buoyed by the defeat of Napoléon in May 1814 and relative gains made during the Congress of Vienna 1814–1815, gradually became a political reactionary. The Prince himself had grown up during the second wave of north German Romanticism (1807–1815), but became disillusioned by the way that German politics and society came to be conceived under his father. He was particularly concerned by the way in which the Kulturministerium, responsible for both religion and education, gradually came under the sway of Hegelianism through the leadership of Karl von Stein (1757–1831) and Johannes Schultze (1786–1869), the latter of whom would edit Hegel’s Phänomenologie in 1841. In 1828, the crown prince had met Christian Bunsen (1791–1860), who had gained his degree from Jena in 1813. From Bunsen, he became familiar with Schelling’s philosophy and saw how promoting it might be politically expedient. Bunsen himself had met Schelling at Jacobi’s house in Munich as early as 1813. He recounted to his friend, the Romantic poet Ernst Schulze (1789–1817), a debate over the philosophy of time between Schelling and Leo von Seckendorf (1775–1809), Hölderlin’s literary executor. According to Bunsen, Schelling’s ‘mode of disputation is rough and angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible’ (1868: 1: 41). From the very first meeting, Bunsen held ‘an unlimited respect for his intellectual powers and for what he has done towards rationalizing the natural sciences’ (1868: 1: 41). On the basis of Bunsen’s interest, William had begun courting Schelling for some years before 1841. In 1835, after Hegel’s death, he had tasked Bunsen to travel to Munich to meet Schelling and broach the subject of his moving to Berlin in the future (Bunsen 1868: 1: 413; Humboldt 1869: 20–23). Unsurprisingly, then, one of his first acts after his coronation in June 1840 was instructing Bunsen to secure the appointment of Schelling. As Bunsen wrote in a letter to Schelling on 1 August, William aimed to ‘draw personally from your wisdom and lean on your expertise and strength of character’ (Schelling 1979: 409; translated Toews 2004: 22). Like Lady Macbeth feeling ‘the future in the instant’ (1.5.58), Bunsen speaks of their historical moment as ‘pregnant with the future’ (Schelling 1979: 409). The appointment of Schelling as Superior Privy Councilor was duly announced to the excitement of both press and public. The 290 regular

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student places for Schelling’s course were filled almost immediately, and when the first lecture began, the room overflowed with far more than the official 140 places reserved for auditors. The lectures became something of an event, attended by important or soon-to-be-important figures including the historian Jakob Burkhardt, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Søren Kierkegaard and Arnold Ruge. Engels, who also attended, spoke of the lecture in meteorological terms as a ‘thundercloud [which] came up and discharged itself in thunder and lightning which from Schelling’s rostrum began to excite all Berlin’ (1975a: 191). After all the years of silence, Schelling’s return to the philosophical stage seems to have had a seismic effect on not only those in attendance but the wider political culture of the period. A vivid picture of just what it was like attending the lectures has been left for us by Kierkegaard, who writes in a letter on 18 November 1841: Schelling has commenced, but amidst so much noise and bustle, whistling, and knocking on the windows by those who cannot get in the door, in such an overcrowded lecture hall, that one is almost tempted to give up listening to him if this is to continue. (2009: 97–98)

The grandiosity of the event contested with the man himself, ‘most insignificant’ in appearance, looking ‘like a tax collector’ (Kierkegaard 2009: 98). Writing almost a month later on 14 December 1841, Kierkegaard comments on the ‘extraordinary audience’ Schelling’s early lectures commanded (2009: 104), and, the following day, he commented on their make-up: Schelling lectures to a select, numerous, and yet also an undique conflatum auditorium [audience blown together from everywhere]. During the first lectures it was almost a matter of risking one’s life to hear him. I have never in my life experienced such uncomfortable crowding – still, what would one not do to be able to hear Schelling? (2009: 107)

But Schelling’s supposedly triumphant return did not last long without controversy. Karl Ludwig Michelet (1801–1893) attacked him sharply in the preface to his new edition of Hegel’s Die Naturphilosophie, and beyond the philosophical controversies, there were other, not unrelated, political concerns. On 8 January 1842, Kierkegaard notes that Schelling’s position was uncomfortable: ‘He has become involved with Court interests’, making ‘his conduct rather detested’ among certain

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factions, and ‘the Hegelians are fanning the flames. Schelling looks as sour as a vinegar brewer’ (2009: 118). This political dimension amounted to more than a confrontation between Schelling’s new positive philosophy and Hegel’s old negative one, however. Schelling had been called upon by William IV specifically insofar as the appointment helped to justify not only his proposed ‘reformation’ of the Prussian Nation as a Volk, but also insofar as it served to simultaneously buttress the King’s self-proclaimed status as Volkskönig, the people’s king (Toews 2004: 26–27). In his letters to Schelling, Bunsen described the Volkskönig in idealist language as the ‘organ of the nation’ (Schelling 1979: 409). Popular opinion soon came to associate Schelling’s positive philosophy and the politics of this new Prussian King. As Engels wrote in ‘Schelling on Hegel’, published in Telegraph für Deutschland, December 1841: Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public opinion in politics and religion, that is, over Germany itself, is being fought, and […] he will reply that this battlefield is the University, in particular Lecture-hall No. 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures on the philosophy of revelation. (1975b: 181)

Satirizing Schelling’s pretentions and his eager audience, Engels comments that ‘some of his hearers are making progress and have already got as far as indifference’ (1975b: 187). A year later, Karl Marx (1818–1883) wrote to Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), asking him to contribute a piece to the Hallischen Jahrbücher attacking the ‘windbag’ Schelling, ‘the 38th member of the Confederation’ (1975: 349). ‘Schelling’s philosophy’, Marx continues, ‘is Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae’ (1975: 350).

Schelling and the British Press, 1841–1843 How, then, did the British press respond to Schelling’s appointment to Berlin, to this corporeal manifestation of the new Prussian Spirit? The first chance that the wider British public had to hear of Schelling’s appointment dates to 16 February 1841. In the ‘Paris Letter’ from that date, a regular column featured in The Literary Gazette, the author notes that ‘Professor Schelling of the University of Munich has just accepted (with permission of his own sovereign) the invitation of the King of Prussia to fill the chair of Transcendental Philosophy at

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Berlin, with a salary of 3500 thalers’ (1841d: 124). Less than a week later, in an entry dated 21 February 1841, the column of the ‘Foreign Correspondent’ of The Athenæum also noted the appointment. Although written anonymously, the foreign correspondent based in Germany during this period was the poet and translator Thomas Medwin (1788–1869), one-time editor of the New Anti-Jacobin, cousin and biographer of Percy Bysshe Shelley and a close friend of Lord Byron. Writing from Munich, Medwin comments on the events in more detail: Literature and Art have met a new Mæcenas in the person of the King of Prussia, if he not be going too far in inveigling eminent men to his own court. For instance, Professor Schelling, – a name which every Englishman must regard with respect, has been invited to Berlin from Munich, and will probably answer the call. (1841a: 211)

The allusion is to Gaius Maecenas, the Roman patron to Horace and Virgil, with Medwin suggesting either that William IV’s reign was to bring about a new classical age through his patronage, or that he hoped that it would. This idea was one that The Times would also pick up on, with Schelling’s name mentioned as a part of a new courtly celebrity clique in Berlin. Even before his Berlin lectures began, The Times ran a notice on 23 October on the performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s (1791–1864) Klopstocks geistliche Gesänge (1837). Meyerbeer had been appointed Prussian Generalmusikedirektor by Alexander von Humboldt and the performance was attended by ‘all the musical dilettanti and distinguished literary characters’ who had been congregated to William IV’s Berlin, including Schelling as well as Tieck and A. W. Schlegel (1841e: 5). But more striking in Medwin’s column for The Athenæum is his parenthetical assertion that Schelling’s is ‘a name which every Englishman must regard with respect’ (1841a: 211). This was far from the case, for Schelling’s name had become a by-word in certain British circles for mysticism and obscurantism, as we have seen. Indeed, Medwin himself would later deploy the proper name ‘Schelling’ as something of a shorthand in his novel Lady Singleton (1843). There, the character of Teufel, whose name means ‘Devil’ and who figures himself as ‘a new Frankenstein’ (3: 44), meets Goethe in Weimar and initiates himself in ‘an unknown tongue’, the ‘Transcendentalism’ of Schelling (3: 48), which here takes on the function that the reading of Agrippa had for

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Victor in Mary Shelley’s novel (1818). And so indeed, it proved, for by the time that Medwin returned to the subject in his column for The Athenæum nearly four months later, this ‘respect’ already appeared to be waning. This column, published on 21 June 1841 began to explicate the links between Schelling’s appointment and contemporary Prussian politics for the general British reader: A critical, but not very complimentary sketch of Raumer has lately appeared in the ‘Hallische Jahrbücher’, a work of deservedly high character, but doubly dyed with the mystic philosophy of Hegel. I know not whether you are aware that Berlin is the stronghold of Hegel’s sect, with Gabler von Henning and others for its chief defenders. The King, who is in German phrase a Pietist, has at length taken steps to counteract its (as he supposes) pernicious influence. Schelling was accordingly invited hither from Munich; and it is hoped that the veteran philosopher will succeed in uniting under the banner of a productive and Christian philosophy the scattered and conflicting views which at present so much impede the development of sound philosophical inquiry. So far so good. Let the champions of mysticism and truth enter the arena, and essay their relative strength. But I can picture to myself your astonishment, when I tell you that the government of Prussia […] is about to settle the matter in a more summary way, by suppressing the ‘Hallische Jahrbücher’, the main organ of the Hegelites, although this review is of a purely literary and philosophical, and not political tendency [which] now appears under the editorship of Dr. Ruge, at Leipsic. (1841b: 507)1

Medwin’s column introduces the religious, philosophical and political circumstances of Schelling’s appointment, linking the three together for the British public. He also alludes in passing to Ruge, an attendee at Schelling’s lectures, friend of Engels and Marx, and the editor of the progressive Hallischen Jahrbücher.2 A few years later, after the March Revolution, Ruge would emigrate to Britain, first seeking refuge in London and then moving to Brighton where he lived until he died in 1880. He would lecture on German literature in Willis’s Rooms in London in July 1853, publishing these lectures as New Germany (1854), in which he treated Schelling with characteristic animosity: ‘History could not be undone by the Schellings and Tiecks. They arrived, but in Berlin they were buried by the activity of the free northern spirit before they had time to die’ (1854: 24). Unsurprisingly in the context of the hostility of the Prussian King to the Jahrbücher, the threat of

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censorship noted by Medwin was also a point which Marx would allude to: ‘The entire German police is at his [Schelling’s] disposal […]. A censorship order can prevent anything against the holy Schelling […] from getting through’ (1975: 349–350). Not all of the British papers commented so explicitly on the politics of Schelling’s appointment at this early stage. The anonymous correspondent who contributed the column of ‘Foreign Literary Intelligence’ for The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1841, simply notes the ‘wise resolution’ of William IV ‘to draw the most distinguished literary men of Germany into his interest’ (1841c: 295). More interesting, however, is the first notice of the appointment carried in The Times, a broadly conservative daily. Far from associating the appointment with a movement towards a reactionary politics, as Medwin would, the anonymous correspondent writing from Cologne in The Times (dated 23 February, published 1 March 1841), read William IV’s actions from the diametrically opposite position. Comparing Prussia unfavourably with recent developments in Austrian politics, the correspondent comments that ‘the King of Prussia is treading the slippery path of popularity, and is rendering his capital the focus of literary and artistic talent’, before noting that he had ‘created’ especially for Schelling the new ‘chair of Transcendental philosophy at Berlin’ (1841f: 5). The author suggests the appointment less an attempt to interrupt the growing and dominant popularity of Hegel, but as a manifestation of a different form of ‘popularism’, although precisely how the philosophy of Schelling, a man who had fallen out of the public Prussian consciousness for so many years, was supposed to be the standard bearer for this brand of ‘popularism’, or precisely what would be ‘popular’ about this politics which pitted itself against the social progressivism of the Junghegelianer, are questions passed over in silence. Perhaps it was the same author, now writing from Berlin on 25 November, who would contribute a later portrait of these events carried in The Times. The author alludes in general terms to Schelling’s lectures as presently ‘exciting much interest’ and to his chosen topic, his ‘new and hitherto unknown system of philosophy’. Regardless, however, of the identity of this correspondent, their tone was in keeping with the mid-nineteenth century editorial direction of The Times: The principles of [Schelling’s] system, as far as has yet transpired, aim at the overthrow of the injurious and unchristian doctrines of Hegel, and are intended as much as possible to reconcile those two great conflicting

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elements, science and Christianity. The sensation is immense, the lecture-room is thronged, and hundreds of students are unable to get a seat. (1841g: 3)

The author here takes a clear position: Hegelianism is both ‘injurious and unchristian’, although precisely whether it is injurious because it is unchristian is unclear. The lecture is here palpably an event, a ‘sensation’, and the author continues by noting the celebrity make-up of Schelling’s audience, before posing a question to his readers: ‘Will the Germans after so long adopting the vision of Ficht[e], and Hegel, and Schelling (as a younger man), now allow themselves to be convinced, and assent to the new [ideas] which he has formed?’ (1841g: 3). The question then, according to The Times’ correspondent, is not so much if Schelling can reply to Hegel, warts and all, and materialise this vaunted synthesis of science and religion, but whether his audience will ‘allow themselves to be convinced’ (my emphasis): what is at stake, in other words, is not simply a philosophical question, but one which necessarily touches on contemporary Prussian politics. Indeed, as the author immediately then writes, almost in answer to the question: ‘The subject is an interesting one, not only to the philosopher, but to the man of education in general’ (1841g: 3). Recalling the earlier column, what seems to be at stake is how effective the attempted ‘popularism’ of the new Prussian King would be. The Athenæum covered Schelling’s first lecture in their ‘Weekly Gossip’ column of 4 December, featuring the impressions of a different correspondent writing from Berlin (so, not Medwin), also on 25 November: Schelling, the man who has invariably enjoyed the favour of princes, was invited to Berlin, that he might destroy the good seed sown by Hegel; and, if we may judge by the crowds which attend him and fill the room almost to suffocation, he will certainly succeed. (1841a: 934)

The biblical allusion (Matthew 13: 24–30) suggests the sympathies of the correspondent lie with Hegel and the social progressives. Again, The Athenæum stands apart in seeing the political implications of Schelling’s appointment from these early days. Later in the same note, the correspondent links Schelling’s appointment with the wider situation under William IV: he notes that liberals ‘have been put under the surveillance

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of the police’ (1841a: 934) and that the censors had banned the work of Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), a key figure of the Italian Risorgimento. The crowds Schelling was drawing testified to a spectacle that served to hide an uglier face, so that the writer for The Athenæum ultimately deemed the question posed by the contributor to The Times a moot one: Schelling would necessarily win out, and while he was doing it, slowly but steadily, a new Prussian order would be established. As the writer concludes, it was through understanding the links between Schelling’s lectures and these less visible, more subtle tactics of state control, that ‘you will be able to form an idea of Berlin as it is’ (1841a: 934). Three weeks later on 25 December 1841, The Athenæum again struck a similar tone, publishing an extract from a letter from their Berlin correspondent, dated 15 December.3 They began by relating the latest acts of censorship of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874), whose works ‘contain too many allusions to the public speeches of the King on his accession to the throne, which, it appears, have been entirely mis-understood and mis-construed by the public’, before immediately following this point with an update on the Berlin lectures. Schelling ‘still draws crowded audiences’, the writer notes, adding that, ‘according to his own account, he has not only annihilated Hegel’s doctrines, but offers a system of philosophy superior to any hitherto known!’ (1841a: 994). The exclamation mark suggests the writer’s incredulity, and the fact that this notice immediately follows a comment on the repression of the Prussian regime shows that, however subtly, The Athenæum was beginning to take a political stance. Less than a month later, on 22 January 1842, The Examiner also began commenting on William IV’s new Prussia, making links to Schelling’s appointment. The occasion for an opinion piece on the ‘Politics of the King of Prussia’ was William IV’s invitation to visit England and act as godfather to Albert Edward (1841–1910), Queen Victoria’s eldest son, later Edward VII. Beginning by noting the recent betrothal of William’s niece, Princess Maria (1825–1889), to Maximilian II (1811–1864), and speculating how such a union of Prussia and Bavaria may help to secure William IV’s international position, the anonymous journalist for The Examiner turns to the internal political situation. Noting the ‘fearful homogeneity and similarity of sentiment’ which he deems characteristic of the Prussian population, he comments that ‘to give a press, and a Constitution, and freedom of political discussion to such a people so organized, would be to transfer the Crown to the municipalities, say the retrogrades’.

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The writer then again makes the jump from politics to philosophy in their very next sentence: Then it is superadded, that a bad philosophic spirit reigns; that rationalism in politics has followed rationalism in religion, and that the school of Hegel leads straight to a republic. The King, therefore, has summoned Schelling to correct the philosophic tendencies of his schools. He bids the Censors be tolerant, but he gives as yet no freedom of the Press. […] In short, the King does not resist progress, but seems marvellously uncertain as to what this progress is to end in. One should desire, that [he] sought enlightenment on these subjects from other than Tory sources. (1842c: 52)

Founded by Leigh (1784–1859) and John Hunt (1775–1848) in 1808, The Examiner of the nineteenth century (unlike the short-lived Tory newspaper edited by Jonathan Swift in the early eighteenth century) propounded a radical agenda. In this article, the author notes the difference between William IV’s words and actions on censorship, and bemoans the politics of his advisors. Hegel’s ‘philosophic spirit’, still dominant, has been deemed too politically radical by this new Prussian regime, and the appointment of Schelling is a direct response to the politics, rather than simply the philosophy, of the Junghegelianer. As such, the British press consistently associated Schelling’s appointment with wider developments in Prussian politics during 1841–1843, gradually associating his name with William IV’s nascent reign. But this is not to say that the ‘transcendental’ philosopher, and a post-Romantic approbation of this Schelling, disappeared entirely from view. Typical here is a playful piece published in The Spectator on 25 June, with the nineteenth century incarnation of this daily, founded in 1828 by Robert Stephen Rintoul (1787–1858), broadly reflecting its editor’s politics: non-partisan but leaning liberal-radical. Commenting on the violent altercations in Berlin that were caused by a ban on smoking in the streets, a response to the Great Fire of Hamburg of May 1842, an anonymous contributor quipped that while the Germans bore the suppression of the liberty of their press with ‘phlegmatic stoicism’, they responded more explosively to the ban on smoking: It has excited some surprise that so goodnatured and sensible a man as the King of Prussia should have pressed hard upon this tender point; but it may be accounted for by the influence of his new Professor of Philosophy,

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SCHELLING, who probably cannot bear that men should involve themselves in any other clouds of narcotic smoke than those which his metaphysics supply. (1842d: 615)

An Audience with Schelling: Jowett and Stanley in Berlin, 1845 In the summer of 1838, two years before Schelling’s transfer to Berlin, Bunsen travelled to England, writing to his wife that ‘Schelling and England’ constituted ‘the two poles of my existence’ (1868: 1: 302). He had already met Walter Scott and Julius Hare in Rome in 1832 (1868: 1: 374–375, 380), and when he arrived in Britain, Bunsen made the acquaintance of a large number of political and theological figures, including Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), who he had first met in Göttingen in 1825, and visiting Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) at Rugby, where he was headmaster. Arnold had recently dedicated his History of Rome (1838–1842) to Bunsen, and a few years later, in 1845, the German would name Arnold the preeminent theological force of the nineteenth century (1847: 221–222). Given these influential connections, William IV chose Bunsen to travel to England in June 1841 as a special envoy with the task of setting up a joint Prusso-Anglican Bishopric in Jerusalem. While there, Bunsen became popular in London society, and Queen Victoria chose him for the role of ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a position he occupied 1841–1854. Settling in London, Bunsen’s family began to put down roots. His eldest son, Henry (1818–1855), had been educated under Arnold at Rugby where he was schoolmates with Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the second son of Edward Stanley (1779–1849), then Bishop of Norwich, who Bunsen senior had met in 1838 during his previous visit to England (Bunsen 1868: 1: 504). The two families became close friends, and Arthur would holiday with the Bunsens in Bern in 1841 while the Baron held a short-lived post as Prussian ambassador to Switzerland (Prothero 1894: 250). This friendship between Stanley and Bunsen, seemingly incidental, would play an important role in the history of the British reception of Schelling during the nineteenth century. Stanley went up to Balliol in 1834, and it was during his third year there that he made the acquaintance of Benjamin Jowett (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 48–49), with whom he became life-long friends.

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The significance played by Stanley and Jowett in mid-Victorian intellectual life cannot be overestimated. Stanley was elected Fellow of Balliol and took Holy Orders in 1839. Like Thomas Arnold, whose Life he would later publish (1844), Stanley was a liberal and sympathised with both the university reform movement and with Tractarians, defending John Henry Newman (1801–1890) after the publication of Tract 90 in 1841. Stanley became one of the most important theological figures of the age, appointed as Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1856, and then Dean of Westminster in 1863. Jowett, for his part, remained at Oxford, but he was no less influential for that. The outstanding classical scholar of his generation, Jowett was made Fellow of Balliol in 1838, the year before Stanley, who was two years his senior, and while still an undergraduate. He would be appointed tutor in 1842, and was active in the reform movement, before being appointed Regius Professorship of Greek in 1855. His Epistles of St Paul (1854) had been roundly attacked by the orthodox Evangelicals, leading to Jowett’s contribution to the Essays and Reviews in 1860, and he is remembered today in part for his relationship with Florence Nightingale (1820–1910). But Jowett’s lasting mark was as a philosophical force at Oxford, in particular through his exemplary translation of the Dialogues of Plato (1871). Jowett influenced the syllabus at Oxford, adding Plato where previously Aristotle had predominated (den Otter 1996: 38–45), and introduced whole generations of undergraduates, such as the British idealists Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882), Edward Caird (1835–1908) and William Wallace (1843– 1897), the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) and the aesthete Walter Pater, to recent developments in German philosophy. Christian Bunsen, for his part, would later speak of Jowett as possessing ‘the deepest mind’ in England (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 196). Through Stanley, Jowett came to know the Bunsens and led by Karl (1821–1887), the Baron’s third son, the two travelled through Germany in the summer of 1844. Stanley was taken by the trip, remarking that ‘with the exception of the King and Schelling – two great exceptions, certainly – I saw everyone that I wished to see – Von Humboldt, Ranke, Neander, &c’ (Prothero 1894: 331). The lapse would be partially remedied the following summer, when the friends returned to Germany, with Jowett observing curiously ‘the state of Prussian politics’, saying that William IV’s ‘idea of government’ seemed to be ‘to tread in the steps of Frederick the Great and preserve Prussia as he had raised it, by a military

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despotism’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 97–98). Securing a letter of introduction from Christian Bunsen, the two friends made for Berlin to meet Schelling. But travelling north from Ischl, they ‘heard so much against him, partly as a courtier, partly as a false philosopher’ that ‘the edge of our interest was rather taken off’ (Stanley 1895: 88). At this point, Jowett, by his own admission did ‘not know anything about his philosophy’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 97–98), and it is difficult to surmise how much more than a name Schelling was to the young Stanley. But after the audience, Stanley effused that Schelling was ‘well worth seeing’: The one lecture which we heard, and in which we first saw him, was, as far as we could understand it, very striking, one of his course on the Philosophy of Religion […]. It was a fine sight to see so old a man still labouring in his vocation, and after so long a silence taking his place as the first philosopher of Europe in the same chair in which Hegel and Schleiermacher had lectured before him. There was a large audience, though not so large, they said, as when he first began. (Stanley 1895: 88)

In the subordinate clause ‘as far as we could understand it’, Stanley emphasises Schelling’s mysticism by implication, since his German was strong, and his comments on the audience are unsurprising: by 1845, the numbers listening to Schelling had decreased dramatically. Kierkegaard, for instance, only made it a few months, the last of his notes dating to 4 February 1842 (1989: 412) and writing in a letter two days later of his ‘disappointed expectations of Schelling’ (2009: 134–135): ‘I merely listen to him, write nothing down either there or at home’ (2009: 138). While Kierkegaard stayed a few more weeks in Berlin, he commented at the end of the month that ‘Schelling talks endless nonsense’ (2009: 139). Indeed, a couple of months after Stanley and Jowett met Schelling, he stopped lecturing altogether, though this may have been less to do with audience numbers than his legal fight with Heinrich Paulus over his bootlegged edition of the Philosophie der Offenbarung.4 As for what the two young Brits heard, Jowett, for his part, seems to have detected the politics underlying Schelling’s positive philosophy; or at least, the ways in which politics determined its reception in Berlin in these years. ‘It was evident that there is so much party spirit’ involved in these lectures, Jowett recalled, that it was ‘impossible’ for a foreigner to form an

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informed judgement of what he heard (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 98). It was their private audience that most impressed both Stanley and Jowett. Schelling received them ‘with great kindness; not, as we had rather been led to expect, like Schlegel, with the air of a man who likes to be visited as a distinguished man, but with real simple German friendliness’ (Stanley 1895: 88). Jowett was ‘very much pleased with the old “twaddler” Schelling. He was exceedingly kind, and thoroughly modest and unassuming’ and received them on numerous occasions while they stayed in Berlin (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 98). Coleridge was a prominent subject of their conversation. Schelling apparently took issue with Ferrier’s article on Coleridge’s plagiarism published five years earlier. The Romantic poet, he maintained, had been ‘unfairly attacked’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 98), with Schelling speaking ‘with a very kindly feeling of Coleridge’, although he was unable to confirm from memory if he had been one of the ‘many English who had visited him in his youth a Jena’ (Stanley 1895: 89). Indeed, not only did Schelling defend Coleridge against Ferrier, but he expressed his gratitude to him, with Stanley quoting Schelling, ‘for “having in one striking expression on my theology (that it was tautegorical and not allegorical) [he] collected all that I have thought out in many hours”’ (Stanley 1895: 89), an acknowledgment Schelling had also made when lecturing on the Philosophie der Mythologie in 1842 (SW II.1, 196; 2007: 187n.). The two travelers, lodging at 66 Mittelstrasse, also apparently got a taste of Schelling’s humour: the address was ‘“convenient to remember”, says Schelling, “as being an Apocalyptic number”’ (Stanley 1895: 90). Jowett was evidently somewhat star-struck, and upon his return, his students were regaled with accounts of the audience with Schelling. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861), poet and close friend of Matthew Arnold, noted his return in a letter dated 28 September: ‘Jowett comes hither, having been Stanley’s companion in Germany. They saw Schelling, who spoke to them of Coleridge with high praise, saying that it was an utter shame to talk of his having plagiarised from him’ (1865: 76). Sir Alexander Grant (1826–1884), a student of Jowett’s at Balliol who would go on to publish The Ethics of Aristotle in 1857, adopted as the standard textbook at Oxford, recalled Jowett seemingly adopting Schelling’s stance as his own during tuition, confirming Stanley’s report regarding Schelling’s high opinion of Coleridge’s term ‘tautegory’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 145). Nor did Jowett’s

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interest in telling these tales dissipate with time, with John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), poet, critic and aesthete, recording in his diary of 1861 the Berlin narrative told to him when he was at Balliol (Brown 1895: 1: 186–187). But the interest was more than simply a celebrity anecdote to Jowett, and if he had known little Schelling before Berlin, he quickly caught up. In a letter dated 21 August 1847, he told Ralph Lingen (1819–1905), then Fellow at Balliol, later permanent secretary of the treasury, that ‘I have got transcendentalized lately with reading Schelling’s Systems of Nature’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 160). That same month, he opined to Stanley ‘that the German theologues get more and more drawn into the whirlpool of philosophy, and that all their various harmonies are but faint echoes of Schelling and Hegel’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 142), and in a later letter from 19 April 1849 to his old student Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897), the poet and critic and future Professor of Poetry at Oxford, then Fellow at Exeter, Jowett reveals that he had been reading the Akademierede which he enthusiastically recommended (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 162). If Jowett’s private practice showed his keen interest in Schelling, his published statements were less effusive in their praise. The same was true of Stanley. When he preached his Sermons on the Apostolical Age at Oxford, the year after they returned from Berlin, the new influence of Schelling’s approach to his theology may have been clear to those aware of the German philosopher, but it was not something Stanley acknowledged explicitly. Indeed, if he openly cited the influence of ‘Schelling in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation’ in his preface when he revised them for publication in 1847 (notably, then, before Schelling himself had published them), he added the caveat that he was not ‘rendering myself responsible’ for Schelling’s ‘general views’ (1847: vii–viii). Jowett, for his part, also distanced himself from Schelling in his published work as his career progressed, and particularly from his tendency to ‘wrap up in mystery the Word of life [and to] carry us into an atmosphere which none else can breathe’ (Jowett 1855: 2: 425), although the diffuse traces of Schelling’s influence could still have been discerned by the keen eye.5 Still, their audience had a lasting impression throughout their careers. In his lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (1861), Stanley recalled Schelling’s discussion of Fyodor Golubinski (1797–1854), partly from the account of August von Haxthausen (1792–1866), but ‘partly from what I heard myself’ (490n.).6 Jowett, for his part, still considered the trip perhaps the key moment of the

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intellectual apprenticeship of the two friends. When Stanley died in July 1881, he gave a sermon at Balliol on 15 October, recollecting their time in Germany with fondness, and that they were ‘greatly flattered by a visit from Schelling’. Never one to miss the opportunity for a jibe, Jowett took a passing shot at the number of Schelling’s various systems, concluding that ‘in a few years they were no longer remembered. When I was at Munich a short time since, I asked whether Schelling had left any disciples. The answer was: “Yes, he has left one, and he has no disciple”’ (Jowett 1899: 142–143). Nevertheless, in spite of the reservations that Jowett and, to a lesser extent, Stanley came to have regarding Schelling, the significance played by their meeting in Berlin to later Victorian intellectual life should not be underestimated. As we will see in later chapters, Stanley and Jowett played a key role in disseminating an interest in Schelling’s thought to a large number of students, friends and colleagues. It was through their influence, perhaps more than that of any other figure than Coleridge, Carlyle or Hare, that Schelling figured as a lasting force in late nineteenth century British intellectual culture, and that positive philosophy came to play a role in the discourses of later Victorian theology, mythology and aesthetics.

Notes 1.  Medwin refers to Friedrich von Raumer (1781–1873), the historian, Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826) and Leopold von Henning (1791– 1866), professors of philosophy at Jena and Berlin respectively, with Henning also serving as the editor of the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik. ‘Pietism’, as it was called, was on the rise during the period, and became a point of political contention. Writing in the Foreign Quarterly Review in April 1844, the Prussian correspondent, noting some disturbances amongst the students in Berlin, wrote: ‘Pietism […] designate[s] that exaggerated religious feeling which is supposed to be the surest recommendation in certain high quarters. Every one at the court of Berlin is, or feigns to be, a pietist. The celebrated Professor Schelling and M. Savigny […] are the leaders of this coterie, which is, in reality, political rather than religious’ (1844: 137). 2. Indeed, in this context it is important to note that just over a week before Medwin’s column, on 12 June 1841, James Elishama ‘Shepherd’ Smith’s (1801–1857) translation of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) into English in the periodical The London Phalanx had introduced British readers to a

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socialist attack on Schelling: ‘A reorganisation of Industry or Reform in Labour is a most difficult, practical problem, which […] cannot be solved by metaphysical subtleties [or] the Transcendentalism of […] a Schelling’ (1841: 173). Some years later, an article in G. H. Lewes’s radical paper The Leader used the publication of Hans Christian Ørsted’s (1777–1851) Geist in der Natur (1854) as an excuse to pass comment on Schelling. ‘As a disciple of SCHELLING’, Ørsted ‘would be regarded – and not unjustly – with suspicion here in England.’ The author then comments ‘how complete the realities of life have crushed out of men’s minds the ghostly phantoms’ of Schelling’s philosophy. For this author, ‘the singular incompetence of German Metaphysics to grapple with any of the social problems imperatively demanding a solution […] must have opened many eyes to its intrinsic futility’, before concluding, that the ghost of ‘the White Lady is Liberty! That is why she haunts the palaces of the Prussian King!’ (Anon. 1850: 521–522). 3. The speed of report here was facilitated by the relatively short distance across the channel. American readers would have to wait a little longer, though to their credit, The Dial, which followed Schelling’s lectures with interest, was keenly aware of the politics of his appointment. Founded in 1839 by members of the Hedge Club in Boston, edited by Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), and with contributions from figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Theodore Parker (1810–1860), The Dial was famous for its association with the Transcendentalists and was read by interested parties in Britain, such as Matthew Arnold. Their first notice of the Berlin lectures was published in July 1842, associating William IV’s suppression of the Hallischen Jahrbücher with Schelling’s appointment, before giving another palpable description of the events; the lecture hall ‘crowded to suffocation’, but with Schelling himself ‘apparently quite unconscious that he was making a new epoch in German history’ (1842a: 136). The next number carried an update, including excerpts from Michelet’s preface to his edition to Hegel’s Die Naturphilosophie (1842b: 280–281), and in the new year, The Dial carried a transcript of the text of ‘Schelling’s Introductory Lecture in Berlin’ (1843: 398–404). Their correspondent from Heidelberg once again notes the potentially combustible political climate, speculating that ‘the King of Prussia must expect a new flood of abuse, if he takes a pietist or Schellingean’ (1843: 393) as his replacement for the recently deceased Wilhelm Gesenius (1786–1842). Parker himself, it is worth noting, later travelled to Germany and heard Schelling lecture in Berlin in 1844. Schelling criticised the Hegelian dialectic as ‘merely mechanical’: ‘the grinding in a mill, and men paid much more attention to the noise of the clapper than to the meal which was alleged to be ground. Upon this all laughed.’ (Weiss 1864: 1: 215) Parker

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saw Schelling as an old man, who had ‘lost some teeth, so the articulation is not very distinct’ (1: 215–216), and who used ‘cosmetics and hair-dyes’ (1: 215). 4.  For Marx, it is worth noting, the ‘tremendous fiscal to-do about old Paulus’ soup’ was interpreted as being strategic, a ‘diplomatic masterstroke’, since it deflected attention away from Christian Kapp’s (1790– 1874) recent attack on Schelling’s philosophy (Marx 1975: 350). 5. For instance, in this same Epistles of St. Paul (1855), Schelling’s influence can be felt in Jowett’s use of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), Professor of Theology at Tübingen, who had published Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi in 1845. This was a work that Jowett certainly had read by 1847, when he wrote to Stanley: ‘Bauer appears to me to be the ablest book I have ever read on St. Paul’s Epistles: a remarkable combination of Philological and Metaphysical power’ (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 142). 6. Schelling’s reported speech in the text of the History of the Eastern Church (Stanley 1861: 489–490) was not drawn from the text of Haxthausen, suggesting that this entire digression was drawn from Stanley’s memory of their meeting in Berlin over fifteen years earlier: compare Haxthausen (1847: 82–84).

Works Cited Abbott, Everlyn, and Lewis Campbell. 1897. The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Anon. 1841a. Foreign Correspondence. The Athenæum, March 13: 211. ———. 1841b. Foreign Correspondence. The Athenæum, July 3: 211. ———. 1841c. Foreign Literary Intelligence. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 16: 295–297. ———. 1841d. Paris Letter. The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc, February 20: 123–124. ———. 1841e. Meyerbeer. The Times, October 23: 5. ———. 1841f. Private Correspondence. The Times, March 1: 5. ———. 1841g. Private Correspondence. The Times, December 3: 3. ———. 1842a. Intelligence. The Dial 3 (1) (July): 132–136. ———. 1842b. Editor’s Table. The Dial 3 (2) (October): 278–280. ———. 1842c. Politics of the King of Prussia. The Examiner, January 22: 52. ———. 1842d. Smoke. The Spectator, [n.s.] 15 (730) (25 June): 615. ———. 1843. Schelling’s Introductory Lecture in Berlin. The Dial 3 (3) (January): 398–404. ———. 1844. Prussia. Foreign Quarterly Review 33 (April): 137–138. ———. 1850. Literature. The Leader. August 24: 521–522.

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Brown, Horatio F. 1895. John Addington Symonds: A Biography, 2 vols. London: John C. Nimmo. Bunsen, Christian Karl Josias. 1847. The Constitution of the Church of the Future. London: Longmans, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Bunsen, Frances Waddington. 1868. A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Clough, Arthur Hugh. 1865. Letters and Remains. London: Spottiswoode & Co. den Otter, Sandra. 1996. British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1975a. Schelling and Revelation. In Marx Engels Collected Works, 50 vols., vol. 2, 189–240. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1975b. Schelling on Hegel. In Marx Engels Collected Works, 50 vols., vol. 2, 181–187. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Jowett, Benjamin. 1855. The Epistles of St. Paul, 2 vols. London: John Murray. ———. 1899. Sermons Biographical and Miscellaneous, ed. W.H. Freemantle. London: John Murray. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1989. The Concept of Irony, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 2 of Kierkegaard’s Writings. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. Letters and Documents, trans. Henrik Rosenmeier, vol. 15 of Kierkegaard’s Writings. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marx, Karl. 1975. Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach. In Marx Engels Collected Works, 50 vols, vol. 3, 349–351. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Medwin, Thomas. 1843. Lady Singleton, or the World as It Is, 3 vols. London: Cunningham & Mortimer. Prothero, Rowland E. 1894. The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Ruge, Arnold. 1854. New Germany, Its Modern History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, and Art. London: Holyoake and Co. Schelling, F.W.J. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher. ———. 1979. Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1841–42, ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2007. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. Albany: SUNY Press. Smith, Shepherd. [Anon.] 1841. Extract from the First Number of “The Future”. In The London Phalanx: Vol. 1, 1841–1842. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. 1847. Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh. ———. 1861. Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church. London: John Murray.

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———. 1895. Letters and Verses, ed. Rowland E. Prothero. London: John Murray. Toews, John Edward. 2004. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Haxthausen, August. 1847. Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands, vol. 1. Berlin: B. Behr. von Humboldt, Alexander. 1869. Briefe von Alexander von Humboldt an Christian Josias Freiherr von Bunsen. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus. Weiss, John. 1864. Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 2 vols. New York: Appleton.

CHAPTER 6

The Victorian Literary Reception of Schelling

While it is difficult to overestimate the significance of Jowett and Stanley’s audience in Berlin in the diffuse dissemination of Schelling’s philosophy in later Victorian thought, we should be careful not to minimize the contributions of other British figures who were reading and engaging with his thought during the Victorian period. The figure of Julius Hare was key in helping bridge the divide between the Romantic and Victorian receptions of Schelling. As we have already seen in Chapter 4, Hare’s famous article on ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Opium-Eater’ (1835) was an important document of the plagiarism controversy, but his role as a reader and populariser of Schelling was not limited to this intervention. At the age of nine, Hare had travelled to Weimar with his family, and was there introduced to Goethe, Friedrich Schiller (1788–1805), and Crabb Robinson (1869: 1: 212). While in Weimar, his father Francis Hare-Naylor (1753–1815) clearly kept abreast of contemporary movements in German philosophy. His anonymously published novel, Theodore, Or, The Enthusiast (1807), mistakenly identified as a translation from German (Anon. 1808: 319), contained the first British allusion to Schelling within the context of a work of fiction (1807: 4: 160–161), in a passage quoted from de Gérando (1804: 2: 314), although here Hare-Naylor dismisses Schelling’s philosophy as ‘impious nonsense’ (1807: 4: 161). By the time that Julius Hare matriculated at Trinity in 1812, his knowledge of German was already notable, and it was at Cambridge that he would befriend Connop Thirlwall (1797–1875), later © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_6

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Bishop of St. David’s, and a translator of Schleiermacher and Tieck, as well as William Whewell (1794–1866), later Master of Trinity, and a major figure in the scientific reception of Schelling in Britain. Elected as a Fellow at Trinity in 1822, a position he took at the invitation of his friend Christopher Wordsworth (1774–1846), the poet’s brother, Hare would teach students including the Christian socialist Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), and the poet John Sterling (1806–1844), friend of Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Together with Thirlwall, Hare had translated Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s (1776–1831) History of Rome (1828–1832), and both figures played a prominent role in the ‘Germano-Coleridgean’ school. And with Thomas Worsley (1777–1885), Fellow and later Master of Downing, and Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), the poet, whose Imaginary Conversations (1824–1829) he had helped to get published, Hare travelled to Europe in 1832, meeting Bunsen in Rome before arriving in Munich in mid-October.1 There, Hare met Schelling in person, ‘who, now that Goethe and Niebuhr are gone, is without rival the first man of the age, – I know not who is the second’ (Hare 1872: 458). In his unpublished diaries from the trip, Hare expanded on the point: calling Schelling ‘beyond all comparison the greatest metaphysician alive’. They had been introduced by a German friend named Scheibert, who seems to have known Schelling well. Schelling had apparently been ill when they arrived, but when Scheibert called on him, he was ‘well enough to come out’. ‘Though he is not a man with whom one can become intimate in a moment’, Hare wrote, still he ‘saw and heard quite enough to convince me that he is a person of very extraordinary powers’. ‘Everything he said was full of thought’, Hare continued, combining ‘strengths with perfect ease’. Hare remarked on Schelling’s ‘brow’, a common topic of conversation for a number of his British visitors, ‘and although the fire in his eyes is somewhat dimmed by years, they still retained a most pleasing expression’. Hare was particularly taken by Schelling’s apparent affection for Scheibert’s daughter, an incident displaying the philosopher in a softer, more human role than many of his British visitors recorded.2 Hare’s published work shows that he was widely read in Schelling. Crabb Robinson noted in 1825 that Hare’s library constituted ‘the best collection of modern German books I have ever seen in England’ (Paulin 1987: 177), and Stanley later recalled its ‘preponderance of German literature’ (1855: 8). Hare owned copies of the System der

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Naturphilosophie, Weltseele and Philosophie und Religion, the later of which Coleridge borrowed and annotated (Paulin 1987: 182), but he also had access to the Philosophische Schriften. Thirlwall was also interested in Schelling, writing in a letter to Whewell, November 1849: Hegel […] has no claim to the merit either of original speculation or of a healthy development and judicious modification of previous systems. The master thought of his philosophy belongs to Schelling; all that is his own is the rashness and violence with which he has carried it out into detail, by a perpetual perversion of facts and juggle of words. (1881: 196–197)

Hegel’s ‘ascendency’, Thirlwall continued, was owed ‘in a great measure to the authority of the […] Jahrbücher, the principal organ of his school’, which he descried as partisan (1881: 197). But Hare’s interest in Schelling can be dated to over two decades earlier. In his Guesses at Truth (1827), cowritten with his brother Augustus William Hare (1792–1834), then Fellow of New College, Oxford, Schelling is quoted approvingly for his insights that ‘some minds think about things, others the things themselves’ (1827: 2: 275), a phrase taken from a footnote describing Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) in his Akademierede. Guesses at Truth was popular and influential, and Emerson often quotes this phrase of Schelling’s from this source in his notebooks (Emerson 1963: 298, 299; 1964: 307; 1966: 195; Wellek 1965: 198). During this period, as the early reference in the first edition of Guesses at Truth attests, it was Schelling’s aesthetics which seems to have most interested Hare. When Hare and Thirlwall collaborated on their own journal, The Philological Museum, the second issue, edited by Hare and published in 1833, the year after he had met Schelling, saw a fascinating article ‘On Affectation in Ancient and Modern Art’, signed by ‘E.W.H.’ The author was later identified as being Sir Edmund Walker Head (1805–1868), then Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, later serving as Governor General of the Province of Canada (Anon. 1868: 371). Head had visited Munich in 1827; whether he heard Schelling lecture is uncertain, but he certainly learnt German. Noting ‘the almost total absence of affectation’ (1833: 93) in ancient as opposed to modern art, Head argues a link to what he calls ‘national character’. Since the term ‘affected is generally opposed to natural’ (1833: 93), Head turns to Schelling to substantiate his point: ‘Schelling has observed that in the highest works the artist is necessarily not aware of all the beauties he is producing; and

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that the works which want the stamp of this unconscious skill, are shallow and possess, as it were, no independent existence’ (1833: 94). When Guesses at Truth was published in a second, expanded addition in 1838, Schelling’s role increased. Coming three years after Hare’s article on Coleridge’s plagiarism, the poet is taken up again, with Hare returning to the question of the relative merits of the two thinkers, considering the extent to which Schelling’s work tapped into the unconscious national characteristics of the Germans. ‘Surely this is the highest reward which can fall to the lot of any human intellect’, Hare wrote, ‘to be thus diffused through and amalgamated with the intellect of a whole people, to live in their minds, not merely when they are thinking of you, and talking of you, but even when they are totally unconscious of your personal existence’ (1838: 1: 245). In this second edition, Hare’s quotation from the Akademierede was retranslated and glossed: ‘There is one class of minds […], who think about things, another, who strive to understand them in themselves, according to the essential properties of their nature.’ This is one of the momentous distinctions between men of productive genius, and men of reflective talents. […] Poets, it is plain from the very meaning of the word poetry, […] must belong to the class whose aim is to think and know the things themselves. Nor poets only: all that is best and truly living in history, in philosophy, and even in science, must have its root in the same essential knowledge, as distinguished from that which is merely circumstantial. (1838: 2: 131)

Hare continues by considering the differences between ancient and modern art in terms which are suggestive of Head’s article of five years earlier. For Hare, it is precisely ‘essential’ as opposed to ‘circumstantial’ knowledge which explains ‘why Poetry has been wont to flourish most in the earlier ages of a nation’s intellectual life’: ‘In all poetry […], there must be a mysterious basis, which is and ever must be incomprehensible to the reflective understanding. There must be something in it which can only be apprehended by a corresponding act of the imagination, discerning and reproducing the incarnate idea’ (1838: 2: 131–132). This act of imagination, Einbildungskraft, sees the poet harness the unconscious forces within, in an intuitive synthesis of the Idea and Nature: Its source must lie deep within him, below the surface of his consciousness. The waters which are spread out above that surface, and which are

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not fed by an unseen fountain, are sure to dry up, and will never form a living, perennial stream. (1838: 2: 132)

Given such a strong emphasis on Schelling in their work, it comes as little surprise to find that, with Hare, Thirlwall and Whewell all serving as Fellows of Trinity during the 1820s, a number of Cambridge students during the period would also come to study Schelling.

The Cambridge Apostles Founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson (1794–1863), later Bishop of Gibraltar, the Cambridge Apostles were a group of students who met for regular discussion. Original members included Maurice, Sterling and Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886), philologist and later editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Soon, many of the Apostles came under Hare’s sway. Edmund Law Lushington (1811–1893), a close friend of Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) and later Rector of Glasgow University, recalled that Hare was ‘the best lecturer of his kind’, although Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833), another Apostle, whose death would occasion Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ (1849), was less effusive in his estimation of Hare as a lecturer (Waller 1986: 43). Still, one by one, the Apostles became interested in Schelling. In 1829, John Mitchell Kemble (1807–1857), the philologist and historian, travelled to Germany during the long vacation, staying in Munich. He attended Schelling’s lectures while beginning his study of German philology and would visit the philosopher at his home (Wiley 1971: 75). William Bodham Donne (1807–1882), later the Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, recalled Kemble as being ‘mad for the love of meerschaums, and metaphysics, smoking and Schelling’ (Allen 1978: 99), a phrase repeated by Joseph Williams Blakesley (1808–1885), another Apostle, later dean of Lincoln, in a letter to Charles Barton (1805–1856) (Nye 2015: 239). In a letter to Trench half a year later, Blakesley recalled another Apostle, Thomas Sunderland (1808–1867), the subject of Tennyson’s ‘A Character’ (1830), ‘pursuing his metaphysical studies […] with such success that he has already passed the flaming bounds of space and time, and attained to what Schelling and himself call the “rational intuition”’. Blakesley, however, was more circumspect with respect to Schelling than Kemble or Sunderland appeared to have been, pointing out that

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‘the essential nature of his doctrine is that it can be neither attacked nor defended’ (Trench 1888: 1: 50). Sterling was another figure deeply influenced by Hare and another versed in Schelling. In July 1842, Caroline Fox recalled discussing German philosophy with Sterling on the fundamental contention between Fichte and Schelling: A witness told Sterling of an interview between Fichte and Schelling, which concluded by the former declaring that a man who could believe that there was any revelation in the dead Nature around him, and not that it dwelt only in the brains of the few wise men, was not a fit companion for any reasonable being! with which appalling words, exit Fichte. (Fox 1882: 1: 321)

Still, while Sterling sided with Schelling over Fichte on ‘the living, tuneful voice of Nature’ which he taught to be ‘animated by a higher principle than material existence’ (Fox 1882: 1: 321–322), he maintained some reservations over the positive philosophy. In 1843, the year before he died, and responding to Michelet’s recent attacks on Schelling in Berlin, Sterling admitted ‘rather doubting whether Schelling really has any great idea in reserve, other than his early works’ (1848: 1: ccx). Nevertheless, Schelling had deeply influenced his literary career. For Sterling, Germany had ‘begotten all the greatest masters of thought produced in Europe since the time of Rousseau’, and Schelling ranked with Tieck as its foremost living representative, manifesting ‘in the flesh a literature, which for compass, loftiness, and enduring beauty […] is quite unlike almost any thing that either we or our nearest neighbours can boast of’ (1848: 410–411). With Hare still the predominant intellectual force at Trinity, a new generation of Apostles were inducted after Kemble and Sterling graduated. Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885) would study at Bonn after graduating in 1831, before becoming an MP in 1837 and publishing poetry. In 1850, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858), the German biographer, who also knew Carlyle and Lewes and was close friends with Alexander von Humboldt, recalled meeting Milnes in Berlin, after which Milnes had a private audience with Schelling (1865: 344). From this same generation of Apostles, both of Tennyson’s closest friends, Hallam and Lushington, read Schelling, although with differing results. Hallam seems not to have been particularly enamoured

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with what he read. In his posthumously published ‘Remarks’ on the Disquisizioni sullo spirito antipapale (1832) by the Italian poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), father to the Pre-Raphaelite poets Dante Gabriel (1828–1882) and Christina (1830–1894), Hallam noted the similarities between Rossetti’s thought and those ‘wonderful effusions’ of German transcendentalism, ‘where Reality and actual Existence are held cheap, and considered as uncertain shadows’ (1834: 282). In an ironic footnote, Hallam noted that Schelling’s problem of ‘How to deduce the Universe from Absolute Zero’ was one to which the philosopher had yet to find an answer ‘to his satisfaction’ (1834: 350). Lushington, by contrast, became a Germanophile like his mentor Hare. In 1837, his brother Henry recalled Lushington as being ‘deep in Strauss’ (Waller 1986: 103), and in 1839 he discussed German philosophy with his friend George Stovin Venables (1810–1888), a barrister and journalist who was then working on (unpublished) translations of Fichte (Waller 1986: 103). In 1841, Lushington published a review in Kemble’s British and Foreign Review of Observations on the attempted application of pantheistic principles to the theory and historic criticism of the Gospel (1840) by William Hodge Mill (1792–1853). Lambasting Mill’s poor command of German philosophy, Lushington held Mill’s comments on Schelling ‘an imputation […] ventured on slight or dubious evidence’ (1841: 527). In the course of his review, Lushington scrupulously traces the German originals in a manner that Mill had not, quoting at length from the Freiheitsschrift in his own translation (1841: 524), alluding to the Methode (1841: 527–528), and translating from the 1834 ‘Vorrede’ to Cousin (1841: 530). Lushington commends Schelling’s ‘cogent and luminous argument’ (1841: 524) in contradistinction to Mill’s sloppy scholarship and offers a strong defence of Schelling against the charge of pantheism. By extension, the review also began to reposition Schelling within post-Romantic Victorian discourse.

Cleasby and Reeve in Munich, 1830–1833 Kemble was not the only British student destined to become a significant philologist who would study with Schelling during the period. In 1830, the year after Kemble travelled to Germany, Richard Cleasby (1797– 1847) arrived in Munich to learn from Schelling. Today best remembered for his posthumously published Icelandic–English Dictionary (1874), Cleasby had studied with Hamilton in Edinburgh, 1827–1829,

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and ‘fortified with his Scotch metaphysics’ began on German philosophy (Cleasby 1874: lxv). He began studying philology with Hans Ferdinand Massmann (1797–1874) and Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785–1852), but was immediately attracted by Schelling’s philosophy. On 16 November 1830, Cleasby recalls hearing ‘Professor Schelling deliver his introductory lecture to the course he intends reading this season on the Philosophy of Mythology. […] He received a treble “Lebe Hoch” on appearing, and was much moved in reading the first part of his lecture’ (1874: lxvi). Cleasby soon became familiar with Schelling, and on 5 January 1831 notes: ‘I dined with a large party of Professors, who met to-day and celebrated Schelling’s birthday, but “Deutscher Ernst” [German seriousness] was too leading an ingredient in the assembly, and it went off heavily’ (1874: lxvii). Cleasby also took other classes, including those of Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), who had left his position at Jena to take up a role at Munich in 1828. Giving an insight into the financial situation of both the lecturers and students at Munich during this time, Cleasby recalls that Oken threatened to cancel the class since ‘only 4 or 5 [of the students] had inscribed their names’, although another ‘30 or 40’ were in attendance: ‘The students here, many from poverty, many from shabbiness, are excessively shy about paying the fees’ (1874: lxvii). Cleasby attended Schelling’s lectures regularly through to 15 August 1832, when he ‘closed his lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation, completing, with his Philosophy of Mythology, an entire and perfect course. I gave a crown dollar (4s. 6d.) towards a serenade for him this evening’ (1874: lxviii). He returned to study with Schelling again in the autumn and continued to cultivate their personal relationship. On 29 November, Cleasby recalls the fascinating insight that Schelling had at one time intended to travel and work in England: ‘Schelling told me to-day, that during the troubles of the war in Germany, when there was scarcely any telling what might be the result, he had formed a plan for going to England to give instruction in the Latin language, having excogitated a method by which to teach it in half the usual time’ (1874: lxviii). Cleasby left Munich having completed his studies in June 1833, travelling more widely in Germany and meeting figures such as the brothers Grimm and August Schlegel, but maintained his relationship with Schelling indirectly through Schmeller and discussed his philosophy with the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846), with whom Cleasby stayed in 1834 (1874: lxxi). When he eventually returned to Munich in May 1842, Schelling had left, but Cleasby went on to Berlin in June,

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seeing his old tutor once again, ‘looking on the whole lively and well’. Cleasby, however, detected some nostalgia in the aging philosopher, for while ‘he said he had very reason to be satisfied here, […] still I thought [he] did not seem altogether to relinquish the idea of returning to Munich, and I thought this seemed more the case with his wife and daughters’ (1874: xc–xci). While Cleasby was in Munich, one his closest friends was also studying under Schelling. Henry Reeve (1813–1895) was a poet and journalist, today best remembered for his translation of De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859). Reeve had been in Venice in May 1830 and already felt himself ‘under the wings of Schelling’ (Laughton 1893: 1: 24), arriving in Munich in June. Schelling, to whom Reeve ‘had letters’ (although from whom is unclear) ‘received me kindly, and I resolved to follow his lectures’ (Laughton 1893: 1: 25). Reeve was inspired by the artistic climate he discovered in Munich, where ‘the king governs his people by poetry and painting’ (Laughton 1893: 1: 25), and his diaries record him calling at Schelling’s home almost daily. But while on good terms personally, Reeve was less impressed with Schelling’s philosophy than Cleasby. Reflecting on his time in Munich in December 1830, he commented that he had ‘heard the first metaphysician of the age enough to see that I differ from him on many points’, but Cleasby did suggest that ‘I have seen much of art, and have arrived at some understanding of it’ and that ‘I have caught a glimpse of my future which has coordinated the development of such activity and capacity as I possess’. He was particularly critical of ‘the system of German study’ which he came to deem ‘essentially vague, and not practical’: ‘there is little intimate connexion between thought and action; that the lore of their schools is over-dusty, and the language of the wise men over-dogmatical; that, in short, the speculative has overgrown and overtopped the real’ (Laughton 1893: 1: 28). At Schelling’s lectures, Reeve made the acquaintance of another British traveller, Edwin Hill Handley (1806–1843), a friend of Christopher Wordsworth. In his diary, Reeve records Handley’s 1833 engagement to Delphine von Schauroth (1813–1887) (Laughton 1893: 1: 27), the composer who had been courted by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) three years earlier, with Schauroth contributing a passage to his Concerto in G minor (1831) (Todd 2003: 249). Reeve would meet Handley again at Cambridge in October 1833, where he would also become friendly with Kemble, Whewell, Tennyson and Christopher

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Wordsworth, and in a letter to Hanley of 7 February 1834, who had by then returned to Munich, he asks to be ‘remember[ed] kindly to all the Transcendentalists’. Handley had seemingly sent him a translation of one of Schelling’s works upon which he was then working, and Reeve replies with his thoughts: In the introduction to your translation, since Schelling is the object and positive substance of the work, I hope you will make due mention of Giordano Bruno, and especially of [Johann Georg] Hamann [1730-1788], whom Goethe styled the father of the German philosophy, and whom I have heard Schelling himself mention as the Urquelle of his system. (Laughton 1893: 1: 32)

By the time that Reeve wrote to Handley in February of the following year from Paris, where he socialised with figures such as Victor Hugo (1802–1885), Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), and the historian François Auguste Alexis Mignet (1796–1884), he had become a disciple of Cousin. Reeve asks that Handley trouble Schelling for information about some manuscripts of Abelardus held in Munich, begging Handley present Schelling ‘with the united salutations of myself and my illustrious friend’ (Laughton 1893: 1: 40). In Paris, he also met Kenelm Digby (1797–1880), ‘the true descendant of the great man [the Elizabethan natural philosopher] whose name he bears’, at whose house he ‘made the acquaintance of M. [Alexis-François] Rio, a man whom I have long esteemed for his works, and who knows Schelling […] well’ (Laughton 1893: 1: 44). From this period also dates a letter Reeve wrote to William Taylor of Norwich, the philosopher who Mackintosh had mistaken for the ‘writer now alive in England, who has published doctrines not dissimilar to those which Mad. de Staël ascribes to Schelling’ (1813: 226).3 In this letter, dated 13 March 1834, Reeve presses Taylor on ‘the precise distinction between the words allegory, symbol, and emblem’. With Coleridge and the Romantics, Reeve maintains ‘the word symbol […] to be restricted to an object really connected with the idea which is presented; whereas an allegory or emblem has a purely ideal existence’ (Robberds 1843: 2: 561–562). Reeve turns to Schelling to develop his thinking, asking Taylor if ‘the ancient cosmogonical and theogonical doctrines are allegorical or symbolical?’ (Robberds 1843: 2: 562), obviously thinking here of the lectures he had heard in Munich four years earlier. This prompts in Reeve a ‘metaphysical question of much greater extent’:

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whether it is by allegory, symbol, or emblem, that the “invisible is made clear in the visible” (Romans 1:20), and that the relation of form to essence, of the real to the ideal, exists? This, you will say, is extending Symbolik-Lehre a great way; perhaps it is more prudent to confine oneself with Schelling to the axiomatical identity of the real and the ideal; but still it is desirable to know how far the words in common use may with propriety be pressed into the service of philosophy. (Robberds 1843: 2: 562)

In this letter, Reeve clearly seems to assume as a given Taylor’s facility with Schelling, a point by no means certain, for while Taylor was widely read in German philosophy, we have no evidence that he had read Schelling. In his reply, while admiring Reeve’s ‘attention to German writers’, Taylor sidesteps the allusion to Schelling, politely clarifying the philological dispute (Robberds 1843: 2: 564). And while Reeve’s path gradually took him away from Schelling towards Cousin, the German philosopher retained his importance in Reeve’s poetry. It was a few years later that he would publish his volume, Graphidae, or, Characteristics of Painters, privately printed in 1838 and reissued for public distribution in a second edition in 1842. This collection included a short poem on Guido Reni, the high Baroque Italian painter, prefaced by an epitaph from Schelling’s Akademierede given in German: ‘Guido ist eigentlich der Mahler der Seele’ [Guido is in a peculiar manner the Painter of the Soul.] (Reeve 1842: 22; quoting SW I.7, 320; 1845: 28).

Translating Schelling: Johnson, Chapman and Patmore In the 1830s, the translation of a number of German works brought contemporary responses to Schelling by some of his notable peers to the attention to English readers. Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) lectures on the Philosophie der Geschichte (1828) were published in 1835 in a translation by James Burton Robertson (1800–1877). A historian whose translation of Johann Adam Möhler’s (1796–1838) Symbolik (1843) would be influential on the Tractarians, Robertson was later nominated for the Chair of History at the Catholic University at Dublin by Newman, and his translator’s notes to his edition of Schlegel show how his approach to Schelling was mediated through the Catholic interpretation of his philosophy propounded by Franz Joseph Molitor (1779–1860) (1835: 1: lvii–lviii, 113, 183). Two years later, an anonymous author wrote a series of extended articles for The Eclectic Review

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on Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873) in which Schelling duly featured (Anon. 1837: 451–453). Nevertheless, beyond snippets in the writings of Coleridge (acknowledged or not) and Hamilton, Schelling himself still remained untranslated into English up until the 1840s. It was from the pen of Reeve’s aunt, Sarah Austin, that the first longer translations of Schelling appeared in her Fragments from German Prose Writers (1841). Like Reeve, Austin was friends with Cousin and had travelled widely in Germany with her husband, the legal theorist John Austin (1790–1859), the two settling on the Continent after 1838 after John, who suffered from depression, was made redundant. Sarah’s Characteristics of Goethe (1833) met the approval of Carlyle, who effused ‘I hear the fine silver music of Goethe sound through your voice, through your heart; you can actually translate Goethe, which (quietly, I reckon) is what hardly three people in England can’ (1978: 6e). Her Fragments included a short passage from the Methode (1841: 120–122; translating SW I.5, 311–312; 1966: 108–109), very liberally translated, and a brief notice of Schelling’s life (1841: 329–330) which addressed the charge of his pantheism, a subject also discussed briefly in her Goethe (1833: 1: 301–302). The following year, the ‘Introductory Lecture at Berlin’, translated from Paulus’ bootlegged version, also appeared in English, published in America in The Dial (1843: 398–404). Still, it was not until 1845 that the first full translation of one of Schelling’s works into English appeared, a version of the Akademierede under the title The Philosophy of Art. The text appeared in the Catholic Series published by John Chapman (1821–1894), and the translator was one Andrew Johnson. We know relatively little of Johnson’s life: he had been a clerk at the bank of England since 1832 and would later become Principle of the Bullion Office in 1866. The only other books he published were on economics, but he published some articles on contemporary literature in Chapman’s Westminster Review in the 1860s. He seems to have socialised with Chapman’s circle; Elisabeth Tilley, Chapman’s mistress (Hughes 1999: 100–108), celebrated New Year’s Eve in 1850 at a party at Johnson’s house (Haight 1969: 124). Johnson was also well connected with German intellectuals during the period. When Marx wrote to Engels on 28 October 1852, he gave Johnson’s address at the Bank of England for ‘important’ correspondence (1983: 227), and Johnson had also had the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876) stay with him in London the year beforehand (Haight 1954a: 356). Freiligraph had first met Johnson on a visit to London 1846–1848,

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before returning to Germany to participate in the March Revolution, and Chapman had helped Johnson publish an article on Freiligraph in The Leader in 1851 (Ashton 2011: 165). It would be at Johnson’s house in 1852 that Chapman would meet Marx, who wrote to Engels on 2 September entertaining hopes that Chapman might publish an English version of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Johnson’s preface announced his intention to bring to the attention of English readers the ‘celebrated Essay’, and he bemoaned the fact that ‘in England there has been but little endeavour, since the last generation, after a scientific system of Esthetics’ (1845: i). He was hardly alone in the opinion, and it was one that Schelling himself shared. Crabb Robinson recalled his attacks on the empiricist tradition while he lectured on aesthetics in Jena in 1802: for Schelling, the British were constitutionally unable to develop a coherent philosophy of aesthetics of their own (Morley 1929: 118; Robinson 1869: 1: 128–129). Johnson, seemingly unaware of this point, is less dismissive of the future possibility of a British aesthetics, suggesting indeed that the failures of Coleridge meant that English aesthetic philosophy should instead attempt to progress ‘organically’ ‘from Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, as the German one did from Leibintz [sic.], Kant, and Fichte, to Schelling and Hegel’ (1845: ii). According to Johnson, the essential differences between British and German aesthetics lay in the fact that Schelling’s investigation proceeds ‘from the idea of art itself; whereas our criticism is rather founded upon a confused consideration of its works’ (1845: ii). Johnson’s preface does not develop upon this consideration, however, one which would prove important to later aesthetic British responses to Schelling’s philosophy, simply noting that the Akademierede ‘is, in fact, an application to art of Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. Maintaining, as he does, a creative purpose in nature (anima mundi), he treats the creative power of genius in art as it[s] intellectual corrective’ (1845: iii). Schelling’s Akademierede is effectively left to fend for itself with Johnson’s English readers, and in a note to his preface he passes the responsibility for helping his reader ‘become more intimately acquainted with the general aspect of Schelling’s Philosophy’ off to Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann’s (1761–1819) Geschichte der Philosophie (1829), translated in 1832 as A Manual of the History of Philosophy by Arthur Johnson (1797–1853). This Johnson, no relation, was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and the author of Christus Crucifixus (1831); before Lewes, his translation of Tennemann’s volume was influential during the 1830s and early 1840s

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in shaping the popular British understanding of German philosophy, particularly given the limitations of Stewart’s Dissertation. But it is odd that Andrew Johnson would have directed his readers to this work given Tennemann’s impatience with Schelling’s philosophy of art, which he considers ‘incomplete’ and fragmentary (1832: 445). Moreover, while Tennemann credits Schelling’s theory as ‘remarkable for the originality of the views it contains, the magnitude of the problems it would solve, the consistency of its plan, and the vast circle of its application’ (1832: 446), he is ultimate hostile towards it. Schelling’s ‘whole theory is nothing better than an ingenious fiction’, and his style faulted by a ‘vague and indeterminate mode of expression’ (1832: 449). The ‘peculiar difficulties’ of Schelling’s style were also noted by Johnson in his preface to his translation of the Akademierede, but in a different manner: words which ‘have a clear and determinate meaning’ in Schelling’s German ‘become vague and deficient in force and exactness when translated’ (1845: iv). Perhaps it is this difficulty which explains some of Johnson’s inconsistencies in his translation, but the large number of typographical errors (for instance, the names of both Arthur Johnson and Tennemann are misspelt) are not likewise excused. Johnson’s translation was widely reviewed in contemporary periodicals, with one particularly appreciative notice of this ‘admirable oration’ written by Coventry Patmore (1823–1896), the poet today best remembered for The Angel in the House (1854). Published in The Critic, 1 May 1847, Patmore’s review dates from the period while he worked cataloguing the library at the British Museum, a period during which he ‘read tens of thousands of books’ by his own estimation (Champneys 1900: 1: 68). Patmore’s comments suggest that he held an awareness of the differences which separated the Akademierede of 1807 from the positive philosophy of Berlin, and he shows a command of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie which must have originated from beyond reviewing Johnson’s translation (1847: 338). ‘The oration is elaborate, condensed, replete with suggestions, and […] full of thought and beauty’, Patmore effuses, and while he praises Johnson’s preface as ‘excellent and appropriate’ (1847: 337), such an affirmation is perhaps more an attempt at currying favour given that Patmore was not yet an established journalist. Most interestingly, Patmore draws an ethical lesson from the Akademierede, one which is not actually emphasised by Schelling himself in this text. For Patmore, British thinkers have been blind to the implications of a Naturphilosophie such as Schelling’s, unable to see that ‘all

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institutions, whether civil or religious, are the results and exponents of character, and their rise and decay registers the progress of humanity, and their creation is by an interior growth, and not by external formation’ (1847: 337). As such, his reading of Schelling foreshadows his consideration of the ‘Ethics of Art’ (1839) that he would develop in a review two years later. Indeed, Patmore evidently intended to return more explicitly to the subject of Schelling, quoting from the Akademierede at some length at the conclusion to his review before ending in parenthesis: ‘(To be continued.)’ (1847: 338). Unfortunately, no continuation of Patmore’s reflections on Schelling appear to have made it into print.

‘The Iscariotism of Our Days’: Eliot and Lewes Other readers of Johnson’s translation would have included both George Henry Lewes and Marian Evans, who later wrote under the more familiar name of George Eliot. The two met in 1851 while Eliot was assistant editor on Chapman’s Westminster Review, for which Lewes regular contributed. Eliot’s interest in German thought, however, predated their relationship by many years: she had begun working on a translation of the first volume of Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu (1835) in 1843, appearing as The Life of Jesus in 1846, published by Chapman, with Johnson’s translation of the Philosophy of Art advertised on its fly-leaf. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, Eliot was reading Spinoza, working on translations of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethica (although neither was eventually published), and Feuerbach’s Das Wesen Christenthums (1841), which she translated as The Essence of Christianity (1854). It was during the mid-1840s that Evans would have read Schelling, who Strauss credits for laying the ground for his analysis (1846: 22, 25, 27, 33), and we know that in the Spring of 1843, Eliot was ‘very anxious to know’ if Mary Sibree (1824–1895) ‘had heard Schelling’ (Haight 1954a: 162) while in Germany. Sibree was a neighbour from Coventry whose brother, John Sibree (1795–1877), was studying (presumably with Schelling) in Berlin in 1842, and who would later translate Hegel’s Philosophie der Weltgeschichte [Philosophy of History] (1857). By June 1851, Eliot knew of Johnson, writing to Chapman of her eagerness to hear more of his ‘conversations with Johnson’ (Haight 1954a: 352), and by May 1852, Eliot knew him personally, dining at his home in Shacklewell (Haight 1954b: 27). Lewes also knew Johnson, although he seemed less keen on him, and after beginning his

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relationship with Eliot, he seems to have warned her away from him. In a letter of 1869, Eliot recalls the misfortune of accidentally getting into the same carriage of a train as Johnson, ‘an acquaintance from whom George has been at great pains to guard me in London’, painting a less than flattering portrait of the banker as a pedant, ‘a man who […] thinks that you have read all his reviews of your books and yet is prepared to recite the reviews for your further benefit’ (Haight 1956: 27). Lewes’ own engagement with Schelling dates to the early 1840s, around the same period that Eliot’s interest began to be piqued. An early fictional piece entitled ‘The Student’ (1837), following the Coleridgean-figure of Herbert, a ‘metaphysician’ prone to ‘inexhaustible incomparable monologues’ (1837: 105), suggests that Lewes maintained some previous interest in idealist philosophy, seemingly alluding to Naturphilosophie: Look through nature, and you find one imperishable and progressive system of universal organism - one universal life! Strip off the outer integuments - the mere vehicle of the soul – and there is no such thing as death in the creation. (1837: 109)

But Lewes did not know German at the time of writing (Ashton 1980: 109), and so this passage likely constitutes pastiche rather than an active allusion to Schelling. Still, when Lewes travelled to Germany a year later, he became inspired, writing to Leigh Hunt that ‘criticism here is a very different thing from criticism in England & believing it is also immeasurably superior I shall not shun it’ (Ashton 1980: 110). It was around 1842, however, that his particular interest in Schelling seems to have become more concrete. That year, Lewes published his important essay on ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics’ in The British and Foreign Review. Reviewing the posthumously published 1835 edition of Hegel’s lectures edited by Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802–1873), Lewes bemoans the paucity of notices on Hegel and on German aesthetics more broadly in the British periodicals, asking ‘Why is there no Professor of Æesthetics at Oxford?’ (1842: 3). When Lewes turns to Hegel’s biography towards the end of his article, he discusses Schelling (1842: 41–42), noting their break and the divergent paths of their respective reputations. Lewes’ letters to Varnhagen von Ense from the period also show his interest in Schelling. Sending on his article on Hegel, and receiving in return some ‘Denkwürdigkeiten’, memorabilia, seemingly including

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a report of his attendance at Schelling’s Berlin lectures of 1841,4 Lewes pronounces himself ‘amused’ in a letter of March 1842. Having read Michelet’s Geschichte der Letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel (1837), Lewes claims he was inspired to write ‘an article on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But then I am forced to deny in toto the knowledge of noumena!’ (1995: 72). Alongside ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Lewes’ article on ‘Spinoza’s Life and Works’, a work which played a major role in Spinoza’s nineteenth-century British reception and was published under Eliot’s editorship in The Westminster Review, marks an early attempt to make good on this aim. Schelling features prominently in the essay, but Lewes’ treatment of his philosophy is uneven. The first time Schelling’s name appears, Lewes quotes a long passage from the Freiheitsschrift, credited as ‘accurately draw[ing] the distinction between Pantheism and Atheism’ (1843: 396), in an effort to defend Spinoza from his religious critics. Lewes gives the passage in English, but it was not his own translation: he had clearly read Lushington’s review of Mill from two years beforehand and lifts verbatim without acknowledgment his rendition of Schelling (Lushington 1841: 524). When Schelling returns to the text a few pages on, now credited as Spinoza’s most important modern heir (Lewes 1843: 404), all of Lewes quotations are given in the original German rather than translation. Why he did not render them into English is unclear, as is the question as to where exactly he found them. In point of fact, only one of the three quotations attributed to Schelling (indeed, the only one Lewes gives his source for) is actually his: the final phrase, aphorisms §§44–45 of Schelling’s Einleitung, published in 1805 in the Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (SW I.7, 148). The first two quotations were instead taken from Georg Michael Klein’s (1776–1820) Beiträge zum Studium der Philosophie als Wissenschaft des All [Contributions to the Study of Philosophy as a Science of the Universe] (1805).5 How Lewes came to discover this work, or on what grounds he mistook Klein’s words for Schelling’s, is uncertain, but given that Schelling knew and appreciated Klein’s treatment of his philosophy, perhaps it is something of a moot point. For our purposes, the significance of this essay instead lies both in the piecemeal nature of his first-hand knowledge of Schelling at this stage of his career, and in the fact that, ‘in spite of different terminology, and a more enthusiastic poetical manner,’ Lewes considers Schelling ‘the same as Spinoza’ (1843: 405). In 1845, Lewes gave a series of lectures at William Johnson Fox’s (1786–1864) Finsbury Chapel, as a prelude to the publication of his

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influential Biographical History of Philosophy (1845–1846). During the autumn of 1845, a couple of months after Jowett and Stanley had their audience, Lewes travelled to Berlin to hear Schelling lecture, writing of the meeting to Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) (1995: 109). ‘Schelling is still living’, Lewes begins his chapter on the German philosopher in his Biographical History: ‘We saw him this spring (1845), hale and vigorous; we heard him lecture with an energy and perfection of delivery few young men exhibit. In his conversation, as in his bearing, there are few signs of age’ (1846: 4: 182). He gives a physical description of the philosopher, noting his likeness to Socrates (1846: 4: 184), a topic which had also arrested the attention of Jowett (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 98). Lewes gives a rather different account of Schelling in Berlin than those which appeared in the periodical press (discussed in Chapter 5). According to Lewes, Schelling’s appearance in Berlin ‘was the signal for violent polemics. The Hegelians were all up in arms. Pamphlets, full of personalities and dialectics, were launched against Schelling, apparently without much effect. His foes have grown weary of screaming; he continues to lecture’ (1846: 4: 183). The irony of Lewes’ statement was that, by the time that these words came to press, Schelling no long continued to lecture in Berlin. In reality, while the pamphlets he alluded to did not have the effect of immediately ending Schelling’s lectures, they took their toll. These attacks, moreover, had even begun to be noticed in Britain. In October 1843, the Foreign Quarterly Review had published a review of Karl Rozenkrantz’s (1805– 1879) Schelling (1843), admired for ‘putting Schelling in the worst possible position, by means the fairest that could be devised’ (Anon. 1843: 147). Two years later in 1845, the year that Lewes was in Berlin, the American theological review Bibliotheca Sacra, also published in London, carried an amalgamated translation by Henry Boynton Smith (1815– 1877) of a series of critical articles on ‘New-Schellingism’ drawn from the pages of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (1845: 260–292). Lewes had begun studying Schelling more closely during the period, both in anticipation of listening to him lecture, and for the express purpose of writing his Biographical History. In the preface, Lewes admits the ‘considerable attention’ (1846: 3: 4) he had devoted to German idealism was in part designed to reply to the deficiencies of Stewart’s Dissertation (discussed in Chapter 3), a text which had, in the absence of serious competition, dominated British discussions of modern philosophy, in spite of its shortcomings. While Lewes would import material from his

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article from the Westminster Review for the relevant chapter on Spinoza, including the passage he drew from Lushington (1846: 3: 146), he cut the passages from Klein, perhaps seeing his previous error. Certainly, his chapter on Schelling shows he was now more familiar with his philosophy, and in the course of his discussion he quotes and himself translates from the Zeitschrift für Spekulative Physik, the System, and alludes again to the Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, although he does not seem to have read the Ideen, since in his chapter on ‘Idealism’ (1846: 4: 28–29) still relied on Hamilton’s translation in ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’. While Lewes’s discussion in the Biographical History is limited to the Naturphilosophie, he gives a strong basic overview of the argument, addressing the accusation of pantheism, but maintaining vaguely that Schelling ‘avoided Spinozism by calling in the aid of Faith’ (1846: 4: 185). Lewes is best, however, when explaining Schelling’s ‘improvement upon Fichte’ (1846: 4: 186), and his analysis of Thätigkeit (1846: 4: 187), Indifferenz (1846: 4: 190) and Potenz (1846: 4: 192) all show solid comprehension, coupled with a lucidity of expression. By this point, however, the ground had begun to be laid for the British reception of Schelling by Hamilton and Carlyle, with whom Lewes was friendly. Perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, Lewes treatment of Indifferenz and magnetism in the Biographical History would have clearly recalled Sartor Resartus for his British readers. In a footnote, Lewes had warned his ‘reader must not complain’ if they found his analysis difficult. ‘Intelligibility is not the characteristic of German speculation; and we are here only translating Schelling’s words without undertaking to enlighten their darkness’ (1846: 4: 191), he writes, in a rhetorical gambit which does something of a disservice to his achievements. Indeed, so successful was the Biographical History that it became the standard work on its subject. Lewes would cash in by lecturing on the subject in February 1849 at Liverpool Mechanics Institute and in March and April at the Manchester Athenæum, with local newspaper reports suggesting that Schelling’s portrait in these lectures caused something of a stir. The German philosopher’s ‘haughty language’, the Manchester correspondent wrote with proud xenophobia, was something which was ‘never heard from our Newtons, Faradays, or Herschels’ (Anon. 1849: 7). With the first edition selling over 40,000 copies, Lewes published a second edition, enlarged and revised, in 1857. Nevertheless, he apparently did not feel the need to update his treatment of Schelling in later editions, a point picked up upon critically by James Scot

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Henderson in a review of the fourth edition in the Contemporary Review (1872: 529–542). Two years beforehand, Henderson had contributed a review of Gustav Leopold Plitt’s (1836–1880) Aus Schellings Leben (1869) under the title of ‘Schelling’s Life and Letters’ to the Fortnightly Review (1870: 504–516), and his articles show that he was well ahead of his time in seeing the ways in which Schelling’s positive philosophy ‘laid the foundation for an advance beyond […] Hegel’ (1872: 542).

Poetic Inspiration: Arnold and Clough Lewes concluded his chapter with a notice of the French translation of Schelling’s System (1842) by Paul Grimblot (1817–1870), and a perfunctory final line: ‘Nothing in English’ (1846: 4: 195). Of course, by the time his Biographical History was published, this was no longer the case, with Johnson’s translation of Schelling’s Akademierede appearing the year beforehand. In the interpretation of the brothers Hare, as we have seen, this text had significance for poets (1838: 2: 131), and many of Schelling’s British critics remarked on the ‘poetic’ nature of his philosophy, often as short-hand meant to suggest his mysticism and lack of philosophical rigour. But perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, and given his influence on Coleridge and British Romanticism, we find that a number of mid-Victorian poets came to be interested in Schelling’s philosophy. Augustus Hare had been at New College Oxford in 1812, where he became friends with Thomas Arnold, later headmaster at Rugby and a close associate of Bunsen’s. A leading figure of the ‘GermanoColeridgean’ school, Arnold came to associate with Wordsworth and Crabb Robinson in the 1830s (Hill 1979: 546), and after reading Guesses at Truth, he also became friends with Julius Hare (Stanley 1844: 1: 91). Arnold had learnt German in order to read Niebuhr, writing his own History of Rome (1838–1842), dedicating it to Bunsen. Through this work, he also was known to, and knew of, Schelling. Bunsen, writing from Munich on 1 August 1838, where he was a regular visitor at Schelling’s, notes the publication of the first volume of the History, but pauses with Arnold’s prefatory remarks, which spoke optimistically of his burgeoning Broad Church sentiments: It would be unfair to withhold from you my feeling, and that of Schelling […], as to the passage on the Church in your Preface. We all think that

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history shows just the reverse of what you seem to express; and that a tendency to the merging of the Church into civil government (which you seem to think the realisation of God’s merciful intentions) is the way to the death and burial of Christ’s Church […]. We think, moreover, that such a tendency would be destructive to civil society itself, as the tyranny of most Governments over the Church is of all tyrannies the most perverse and perverting […]; and from this we must draw the conclusion, that we do not understand you. (1868: 1: 463–464)

Perhaps Arnold’s sons first heard Schelling’s name in this context, but if so they held no grudge. Both Matthew Arnold, the poet who would grow up to be the preeminent Victorian man of letters, and Tom (1823–1900), a literary critic, would be taught German in their youth, and both caught the bug of transcendental philosophy around the same time. In a letter to Clough of November 1847, Tom announces that he is carrying with him copies of Spinoza and Hegel for his voyage to New Zealand (Bertram 1966: 12), and Matthew’s reading lists during the period show a similar interest. Tom recalled that the death of their father in 1842 led the Mathew to plunge ‘very deeply […] in the vast sea of Goethe’s art and Spinoza’s mysticism’ (Allott 1959: 255) and by 1845 he was reading Kant’s Kritik and Cousin’s Introduction (Allott 1959: 258, 259). In early 1846, his reading list including Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Humboldt, alongside Plutarch’s Moralia, Plotinus and, most significantly for our purposes, Schelling’s Bruno, with the Akademierede on his list for 1847 (Allott 1959: 262, 263). Kenneth Allott notes that a French translation of the Bruno was published in 1843, reviewed by Émile Saisset (1814–1863) in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846, suggesting this prompted his interest and that Arnold would have read Johnson’s translation (1959: 162, 264), but he knew German and did not always give the titles of works in their original language in his diaries. Regardless, that two works of Schelling’s appear on his reading lists during such a short space of time suggest that his interest was keen during these critical years of mourning, a period during which Arnold lost his faith. We see the possible influence of Schelling in Arnold’s poetry. ‘In Utrumque Paratus’ (c. 1847), first published in The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849), is a poem which clearly channels Arnold’s reading of Plotinus, but also shows a mark of the Bruno. While Schelling had not yet read Plotinus when he wrote the text in 1802 (Schelling 1984: 228),

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there are plenty of neo-platonic echoes in the text, and Lewes had tentatively called Schelling ‘the German Plotinus’ (1846: 4: 186). Arnold’s poem picks up on these themes, envisaging the ‘sacred world’ (l. 3) as having been imagined ‘in the silent mind of One all-pure’ (l. 1), with the individual consciousness dreaming and ‘waking on life’s stream’ (l. 11). This dream seems to manifest something comparable to Anselm’s ecstatic vision in Schelling’s Bruno, where ‘within archetypal nature or in God, all things are necessarily more splendid and more excellent than they are in themselves, since they are freed from the conditions of time’ (SW I.4, 223–224; 1984: 125); freed, in other words, from those ‘Ages or hours’ described in Arnold’s poem (l. 11). Anselm continues by claiming that ‘the created earth […] is not the true earth, but only an image of the earth which is uncreated, unoriginated, and never to pass away’ (SW I.4, 224; 1984: 125), sentiments echoed in the final stanza of Arnold’s poem: The brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown, […] Yet doth thy inmost soul with yearning teem. – Oh, what a spasm shakes the dreamer’s heart! ‘I, too, but seem.’ (ll. 38–42)

During the same period, Arnold’s close friend, the poet Clough, also seems to have been studying Schelling. Clough, as we have seen, was tutored by Jowett and recalls him returning from Germany in 1845 and regaling his students with stories of his audience in Berlin (1865: 76), and his unpublished Roma Notebooks, written sometime between 1845 and 1849, show Clough responding to developments in contemporary German theology and higher criticism. While Robindra Biswas rightly argues that it would be too simplistic to uncritically accept Tom Arnold’s suggestion that Clough’s discovery of Strauss ‘destroyed for him the faith in Christ overcoming death’ (Biswas 1972: 134–135), this faith was certainly shaken, if not destroyed outright. The Roma Notebooks show Clough responding to Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780–1849), a close reader of Schelling and pupil of Schleiermacher, whose novel Theodor (1822) sees his youthful protagonist attending Schelling’s lectures, attracted by the ‘mysterious depth’ of his philosophy (Rogerson 1992: 35). A few lines on, Clough considers ‘Schl.’ (perhaps Schelling or Schleiermacher) who argued that ‘by his passage tho’ humanity he

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[Christ] renewed it for all men’ (Biswas 1972: 476). It seems in this context that Clough’s Dipsychus (c. 1850), a Faustian drama, may give us a melancholic image of Clough’s reading of Schelling. The title is taken from the Biblical Greek δίψυχος, the ‘double-minded man’ (James 1:8), with the protagonist of Clough’s poem divided by his reading of philosophy. The Spirit, the Mephistopheles of the poem, invokes Dipsychus to Live in metaphysic, With transcendental logic fill your stomach, Schematize joy, effigiate meat and drink; Or let me see, a mighty Work, a Volume, The Complemental of the inferior Kant, The Critic of Pure Practic. (v.154–159)

Earlier in the same scene, wallowing in the depths of his depression, Dipsychus announces that his ‘fierce inordinate desire / The burning thirst for Action’ is ‘gone’ (v.1–2), that he is lost to the ‘Void Indifference’ (v.12), the echoes recalling Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh. Matthew Arnold’s interest in Schelling as a philosopher seems to have been relatively short-lived, with the notebooks which he kept from 1852–1888 only referencing the philosopher directly on one single occasion in an entry of 1874.6 But there is a sense in which the diffuse reception of Schelling in the 1830s may have had a broader impact on Arnold’s career. His father owned a copy of Guesses at Truth and Julius Hare also sent him copies of the Philological Museum (Stanley 1844: 1: 304), and it seems more than likely that Matthew Arnold also knew these texts.7 In this context, we may hear echoes of Schelling as transmitted through these works in Arnold’s prose from the late 1840s and early 1850s. Responding to Clough’s poetry in a famous letter of February 1849, Arnold argues that the most significant thing a poet must cultivate is the quality of ‘naturalness’, ‘an absolute propriety – of form’ which constitutes ‘the sole necessary of Poetry as such: whereas the greatest wealth and depth of matter is merely a superfluity in the Poet as such’ (1996: 130). Arnold, who later came to know Head personally, dining with him in 1866 (1998: 91), here adopts an argument recalling the article ‘On Affectation in Ancient and Modern Art’. Head, as we have seen, had cited Schelling’s authority in arguing that the true poet is one who is ‘unconscious’ or ‘natural’, opposing modern to ancient literature on the grounds of its ‘affectation’ (1833: 93, 94). Arnold, who had read both

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Schelling’s Akademierede and likely Head’s article, makes a strikingly similar argument in the continuation of his letter to Clough: ‘Reflect too, as I cannot but do here more and more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk, how deeply unpoetical the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving: – but unpoetical’ (1996: 131). Indeed, it would famously be this same problem—this issue of the affectation rather than naturalness of the poetry—that lay behind Arnold’s decision to cut ‘Empedocles on Etna’ (1852) from his 1853 volume of Poems, because its hero was too affected with modern concerns: ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves’ (1960: 1). This focus on that which is natural rather than affected also cuts to the core of Arnold’s later concern with the function of criticism. It has been remarked that Arnold’s famous definition that criticism should aim ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ (1960: 215) is Kantian (Armstrong 1993: 211), but it also recalls Hare’s digressions from Schelling in Guesses at Truth, where he defined the poet as one ‘whose aim is to think and know the things themselves’ (1838: 2: 131). In this context, Arnold’s suppression of ‘Empedocles at Etna’ and his letter to Clough a few years earlier, dating from the period when he was reading the German philosopher, suggest that he was concerned that as a poet he was less one of Schelling’s ‘men of productive genius’ than one of his ‘men of reflective talents’ (Hare and Hare 1838: 2: 131).

Later Literary Responses As we shall see in Chapter 10, one of the most important late nineteenth-century literary responses to Schelling’s philosophy came through Walter Pater, a leading figure of British aestheticism, but other writers from the period were also influenced by his thought to different degrees, and merit consideration here. Bulwer-Lytton, the politician and best-selling novelist, was aware enough of Schelling to append a footnote on his philosophy in explanation to his Poems and Ballads of Schiller (1844: 182). More significant, however, is a poem published a decade later by Robert Browning (1812–1889). While he had once averred to Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910) that ‘I never read a line, original or translated, by Kant, Schelling, or Hegel in my whole life’ (Peterson 1979: 51), the name of Schelling turns up in significant circumstances

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in his dramatic monologue ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855). The character of Blougram was based on Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (1802–1865), then Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, and responded to the Papal Aggression controversy of 1850, which precipitated a new bout of popular anti-Catholic sentiment five years after Newman’s conversion. Through his portrait of Blougram, Browning figures Wiseman as a master of casuistry, which he associates with German metaphysics and theology: Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave When there’s a thousand diamond weights between? (ll. 405–406)

Blougram himself treads ‘the line / before your sages’ (ll. 401–402), able to balance seemingly contradictory positions, before which his Protestant critics Profess themselves indignant, scandalized At thus being held unable to explain How a superior man who disbelieves May not believe as well: that’s Schelling’s way! (ll. 408–411)

We will return to the popular association in the minds of many British readers which linked Schelling, Catholicism and sacrilege, played upon here by Browning, in more detail in Chapter 7. Browning’s close friend, the poet Alfred Domett (1811–1887), also maintained an interest in Schelling. Domett had studied at Cambridge before travelling Europe and America, and then emigrating to New Zealand, later becoming Prime Minister. In America, he had struck up a friendship with the American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), who was also interested in Schelling, translating his discussion of Dante’s Divina Commedia, first published in Graham’s Magazine in June 1850, before being reprinted in his complete Prose Works (1857: 1: 434–449; translating SW I.5, 152–163; 1989: 239–247). In Domett’s epic Ranolf and Amohia (1872), he contrasts the image of a proto-Maoriland (Stafford and Williams 2006: 33–56) which constitutes the subject of protagonist Ranolf’s ‘South-Sea DayDream’ with Schelling’s philosophy, in a passage which shows the influence both of Carlyle and of Mansel:

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Those two Ideas we prate about so oft, The Soul – the Universe – are really two, And are identified – O, not in you. or any finite Consciousness so small, But only in the Absolute — the All. Spirit is Matter that itself surveys; And Matter, Spirit’s undisceming phase; They are the magnet’s two opposing poles, And each the other balances – controls: Both in a centre of indifference rest, Which their essential being is confest: As in the magnet’s every point – we see In all the works of Nature just these three; But that which bounds them all and each degree, The Absolute – the Magnet’s self – must be, Except at Being’s most exalted height – Impersonal – unconscious – infinite; For God – that Absolute – still strives in vain, In Nature’s blind inferior works; nor can In any form Self-Consciousness attain, Save in the highest reasoning power of Man, That central point, which Soul and Nature gain; – Unconscious else the Universal PAN. (II.x.5–27)

Two other mid nineteenth century English poets influenced by Schelling were James Thomson (1834—3 June 1882) and Roden Noel (1834–1894), the former famous for The City of Dreadful Night (1874), and the later, one whose reputation has perhaps faded somewhat, but who was popular at the time. In an essay dating to 1865, Thomson considers Schelling as someone whose philosophy may be said to have been anticipated for deep thinkers: ‘some quiet modest man, who has never read a work of metaphysics and knows nothing of the system’ of Schelling, might upon reading him ‘at once feel: This is what I have known so long, yet could never thus express’ (1881: 204). The image recalls Coleridge’s claims regarding the ‘coincidences’ of his thought, whereby reading Schelling was experienced as a kind of uncanny déjà vu. Indeed, in his essay on William Blake, Thomson made the point of noting that it was the influence of Schelling that had removed the original ‘simplicity’ of Coleridge’s poetry (1884: 122). Roden Noel, for his part, is an interesting character in Victorian literature, and he later

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came to be associated with the spiritualist movement. He had attended Trinity, Cambridge, in 1854 and become an Apostle, befriending Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), the utilitarian philosopher and economist who would go on to become Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy. In a letter dating from August 1866 included in his Memoir (1906: 150),8 Sidgwick recommends Noel read The Initials (1850), by the Irish novelist Baroness Jemima von Tautphoeus (née Montgomery) (1807–1893), a popular work which lampooned Schelling in passing,9 before then confessing that his recent reading of Fichte had been a disappointment. Quibbling with the style of the post-Kantians, Sidgwick announced that ‘I am coming more and more to the opinion that the whole “Identitätsphilosophie” (Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) is a monstrous mistake, and that we must go back to Kant and begin again from him’. His final statement, ‘You see, my dear friend, how far we are from an agreement on metaphysical points’ (Sidgwick and Sidgwick 1906: 150), however, speaks to Noel’s more ready interest in German philosophy. Schelling turns up twice in Noel’s poetry. In ‘Mencheres: A Vision of Old Egypt’ (1869), noted by Noel’s friend, Symonds, for its ‘sense of the sublimity of nature, the infinity of the desert, the abysses of the mystic past’ (1897: 82), Schelling is invoked in a note in order to justify Noel’s treatment of his Egyptian theme, with Noel defending himself against charges of anachronism in something of a reply to Arnold’s preface to Poems. For Noel, Schelling, like his titular Mencheres, finds his philosophy both a historical product and somewhat out-of-time: Schelling speaks to the ground of human existence, responding to ‘the same problems, the same conflicts’ irrespective of the age (1902: 73–74). Three years later, Noel published a review of Alexander Campbell Fraser’s edition of the Works of Bishop Berkeley (1871), in which he discusses Schelling on symbolism in an analysis which links his thought with Coleridge, but also with Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) (1872: 82). Noel then attempts to link Schelling’s pantheism with Christian doctrine: The marvellous and beautiful apparent adaption of means to ends in nature suggests design – because there is (as Schelling has explained) a sleeping reason in Nature which awakes in man – which was in the laws that governed the gyration of nebulae – before vegetable, or animal, or rational life became connected with the subsequent stages of such nebulae, and it is just on account of this that human design becomes possible and actual. (1872: 86)

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What is at stake is a question of ‘design’, as it will be for Spencer. But precisely how earnest Noel’s attempted reconciliation here was is unclear, because when he later reflected upon his ‘allegorical’ poem ‘Melcha’ (1885) in 1889, he categorised it as an expression of ‘the philosophy of my ante-Christian years, a sort of pantheistic evolution philosophy’ (1902: 504). Unsurprisingly, ‘Melcha’ shows the influence of Schelling, named alongside Spinoza and Hegel (ii.114–15) as a figure met in the ‘swarming […] animal world’ (ii.96) into which Melcha is thrust, a purgatorial realm of dreams populated by doppelgängers of ‘twin-birth indissoluble’ (ii.106) which emanate ‘from one divine unfathomable womb’ (ii.110). George Gissing (1857–1903) was another late Victorian literary figure to have been interested in Schelling during the period. While Gissing, who had been educated at Manchester Owens College, downplayed the influence of philosophical thought on his fiction, Patrick Bridgwater has rightly pointed out that such disclaimers were disingenuous, and Gissing had portraits of Kant and Schopenhauer hanging in his study (1981: 32). His first-published novel Workers in the Dawn (1880) shows that Gissing was happier with Schopenhauer than Schelling. There, the protagonist Helen Norman, the daughter of a clergyman who had lost her faith after reading Strauss, travels to Tübingen and begins to read ‘the wonderful theories of Messrs. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel’, but swiftly finds herself ‘sick to death of them all’ (1983: 210), turning instead to Schopenhauer (1983: 215). Perhaps Gissing was partly inspired by his close friend, the novelist Morley Roberts (1857–1942), whose The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912) constituted a thinly veiled biography of Gissing. Another alumni of Owens College, Roberts opined in a letter to Gissing in March 1886 that while ‘I am no Sir W.m Hamilton’, he favoured ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ including Schelling (Mattheisen et al. 1992: 16). A month later, he returned to a similar theme in another letter to Gissing dealing with his estimation of ‘Blake (mad W.)’: ‘A mystic, tho’ whether of Böhme or Mme de Guyon […] or Eckhart or Schelling I know not’ (Mattheisen et al. 1992: 26). Six years later, Schelling was the object of a warm joke in Roberts’ humorous short story, ‘The Reputation of George Saxon’ (1892). The story follows the eponymous George, formerly a clerk in Paternoster Row who inherits a fortune and enlists the help of his friend Will to purchase other people’s books and pass them off as his own,

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thereby gaining his considerable reputation. Not content with simply a literary reputation, George moves into philosophy, publishing works which ‘only years of German reading could have enabled Coleridge to have composed’ (1892: 34), and the whole story reads on some level like an affectionate take on the plagiarism controversy. George forces Will to read philosophy to him daily, boning up for public appearances, having ‘created a devil which I [Will] feared and which he worshipped. His reputation was a Frankenstein’s monster’. They study Schelling, with Will ‘racking my brain […] in order to explain [his] subtly conceived and diabolical mysteries’ (1892: 36), language which echoes the Faustian associations of Clough’s Dipsychus or the Frankensteinian associations of Medwin’s Lady Singleton (1848: 3: 48). Six years after the publication of Workers in the Dawn, another major nineteenth-century novelist found in Schelling something of the pessimism which Gissing’s Helen Norman could not. Thomas Hardy’s (1840–1828) interest in his philosophy seems to have been prompted by his reading in 1886 of James Sully’s (1842–1823) Pessimism: A History and Criticism (1877). Sully had studied at Göttingen in 1866 under Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) and at Berlin under Emil du BoisReymond (1818–1896) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), and his Pessimism sees Sully translating from Freiheitsschrift, where Schelling speaks of ‘the “sadness which cleaves to all finite life”, of the deep indestructible melancholy of all life, and of the veil of depression (Schwermuth [Schwermut]) which is spread over the whole of nature’ (1877: 69; quoting Schelling SW I.7, 399). In his notebooks, Hardy is taken with Sully’s description of Nachtwachen (1804), a Gothic text published under the pseudonym of Bonaventura and attributed to Schelling by Sully, as it had been by Jean Paul (1763–1825).10 Hardy quotes Sully at length: It gives us a singularly powerful picture of human life as seen through the pessimist’s blackened medium. In a series of fantastic images which look like the product of a disordered brain, the writer makes to pass before our eyes a number of typical scenes of human life, accompanying his panorama with the bitterest sarcasms on man and the world. Here the life of mankind is presented as a tragi-comedy, which is not worth the representation, in which the most important parts are assigned to the feeblest actors. (Hardy 1985: 170; quoting Sully 1877: 28)

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A few months later, at the turn of the year 1886–1887, Hardy (1985: 185) was also reading Eduard von Hartmann’s (1842–1906) Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) in William Chatterton Coupland’s (1838–1915) translation (1884). Hartmann makes regular reference to Schelling’s theories of the unconscious, and Hardy quotes from one passage in particular where Hartmann openly estimates his debts to Schelling (Hardy 1985: 185; quoting Hartmann 1884: 1: 3–4). These ideas were ones which seem to have made their way into Hardy’s novel, The Woodlanders (1886–1887), which he was then composing, which sees this unconscious natural force at work in the woods and constantly thwarting the rational decisions of its protagonists Giles Winterborne and Grace Melbury. ‘Here, as everywhere’, Hardy narrator notes, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen eat the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. (2009: 48)

And while the influence of Schelling is most palpable in this novel and in his early poetry, Hardy continued to keep the philosopher in mind as his career progressed, as demonstrated by entries in his later notebooks of 1891 (1895b: 53, 87), and again in 1899–1900, after Hardy had returned to writing poetry following the savage critical response to Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). In these late notebook entries, Hardy makes clear the associations he had been implicitly drawing in The Woodlanders between Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’, William Kingdon Clifford’s (1845–1879) ‘Mind-stuff’, Spencer and Schelling’s philosophy of ‘Consciousness in Nature’ and ‘the World-Soul’ which regards ‘the whole of Nature […] as an embodiment of a process by which the Spirit tends to rise to a consciousness of itself’ (Hardy 1985: 95, 109). He also returned to Hartmann, quoting the same passage as he had in 1886–1887 (Hardy 1985: 110), and this time explicitly adding a consideration of Schelling’s aesthetics on ‘conscs. & unconscs. mental activity [as] indispensable for every artistic achievement’ (Hardy 1985: 110; quoting Hartmann 1884: 1: 42). These kinds of associations and allusions placed Schelling into new constellations with later thinkers in the evolutionary sciences, as well as foreshadowing the focus on the ‘unconscious’ and uncanny powers which would later fascinate Freud.

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Notes











1. Augustus Hare gives the date of the entry in his brother’s journals as 15 November 1832, but comparison with the manuscripts held at Trinity, Cambridge, show the date to have been 30 October (Trinity/Add. Ms.c/205, 21). 2. Julius Hare, diary 1832-33, Trinity/Add.Ms.c/205, 21-22. 3. His error was pointed out by de Quincey, who suggested the identity of this figure to have been John ‘Walking’ Stewart (2003: 372). 4. No doubt echoing the account later published in von Ense’s Tagebücher, where Schelling is characterised as standing ‘quietly, speaking of peace, of preserving and building rather than destroying, and of the value of philosophy’, while remaining stonily silent on Hegel (1861: 360). 5. The first passage reads: ‘Die Unendlichkeit ist Gott, angeschaut von Seite seines Affirmirt Seyns’ [The Infinite is God, understood from his affirmative being] (Klein 1805: 245); the second is misquoted from Klein, and is misspelt by Lewes, and it should read: ‘So ist auch Gott das einzig Reale, ausserdem es schlechterdings kein Seyn giebt. Was also existirt, existirt mit Gott, und was ist, ist dem Wesen nach, ihm gleich’ [So God is the only real thing, and there is no such thing as a being. What exists exists with God, and what exists is of God’s essence] (Klein 1805: 239). 6. The entry reads: ‘Schelling says: Reason is the nature of things with consciousness of itself’ (Arnold 1952: 215). In their editorial note, Lowry, Young and Dunn suggest Arnold’s source as Lewes’ Biographical History, but the given the wording, and given his use of this source for his entries on ‘Substance’ on the same pages of the notebook, it seems more likely to be a translation from the French of the article on ‘Philosophie’ in the Encyclopédie des gens du monde, xix, 534: ‘Dans l’école de M. de Schelling, la philosophie est définie la science de l’indifférence absolue de l’idéal et du réel, et selon Hegel, elle est la science de la raison, en tant que celle-ci a conscience d’ellemême comme de toute réalité.’ Earlier, his reading-lists of January 1864 (1952: 573) included Mignet’s Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de m. de Schelling (1858). 7. John Barrell argues, for instance, that Arnold’s memory of Hare’s discussion of Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’ in Guesses at Truth lay somewhere behind his objection to Wordsworth’s ‘tinkering’ with the poem’s ending when he came to edit his poetry in 1879 (1996: 475). 8. Henry Sidgwick’s Memoir was written by his brother Arthur, and his wife Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (1845–1936), sister of the Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1848–1930) and a leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research whose members were influenced by Schelling. The wife of Sidgwick’s cousin, Mrs. Arthur Sidgwick (née Cecily Wilhelmine

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Ullmann) (1854–1934), would become a successful Edwardian novelist, and published Caroline Schlegel and Her Friends in 1889, which relied heavily on the portrait drawn in Schelling’s letters collected by Plitt (1869). 9. The hero Mr. Hamilton is talking to the father of the protagonist of the novel ‘about religion and philosophy, and some acquaintances of the name of Hegel and Schelling’. Upon hearing this, ‘Hildegarde smiled: “If they were talking of Hegel and Schelling, I dare say he has forgotten us and our curls. I should not possibly think of sacrificing my ringlets to please him, and papa I shall probably not see until evening”’ (Montgomery 1850: 3: 127). 10.  The authorship of Nachtwachen remains a contested issue, but most scholars today consider it to have been written by Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann (1777–1831).

Works Cited Abbott, Everlyn, and Lewis Campbell. 1897. The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Allen, Peter. 1978. The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allott, Kenneth. 1959. Matthew Arnold’s Reading-Lists in Three Early Diaries. Victorian Studies 2 (3): 254–266. Anon. 1808. Monthly Catalogue. Monthly Review 55: 318–336. ——— [Augustus and Julius Hare]. 1827. Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. London: John Taylor. ———. 1837. Menzel on German Literature: No. V–Philosophy. Eclectic Review 2 (October): 443–455. ——— [Augustus and Julius Hare]. 1838. Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 2nd ed. London: John Taylor. ———. 1843. Review of Karl Rozenkrantz’s Schelling. Foreign Quarterly Review 32: 147–148. ———. 1849. Lectures on Philosophy. Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Adviser 7 (March): 7. ———. 1868. Sir Edmund Head’s Ballads and Other Poems. The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 26 (12 September): 371–372. Armstrong, Isobel. 1993. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge. Arnold, Matthew. 1952. The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and Waldo Hilary Dunn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 1960. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Volume I. On the Classical Tradition, ed. R.H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1965. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott. London: Longmans. ———. 1996. The Letters of Matthew Arnold: Volume 1, 1829–1859, ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1998. The Letters of Matthew Arnold: Volume 3, 1866–1870, ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Ashton, Rosemary. 1980. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London. London: Vintage Books. Austin, Sarah. 1833. Characteristics of Goethe, 3 vols. London: Effingham Wilson. ———. 1841. Fragments from German Prose Writers. London: John Murray. Barrell, John. 1996. “Laodamia” and the Moaning of Mary. Textual Practice 10 (3): 449–477. Bertram, James. 1966. New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger. Wellington: Auckland University Press. Biswas, Robindra Kumar. 1972. Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bridgwater, Patrick. 1981. Gissing and Germany. London: Enitharmon Press. Browning, Robert. The Poems of Browning: Volume III, 1846–1861, ed. John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan. London: Routledge. Bunsen, Frances Waddington. 1868. A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Carlyle, Thomas. 1978. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 6: October 1831–September 1833, ed. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorenson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Champneys, Basil. 1900. Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 2 vols. London: George Bell and Sons. Cleasby, Richard. 1874. An Icelandic-English Dictionary, ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson with an Introduction by George Webbe Dasent. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clough, Arthur Hugh. 1865. Letters and Remains. London: Spottiswoode & Co. ———. 1995. Selected Poems, ed. J.P. Phelan. London: Longmans. De Quincey, Thomas. 2003. Glance at the Works of Mackintosh. In Articles from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1844–6, ed.

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Frederick Burwick, 271–292. Vol. 15 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge. Domett, Alfred. 1872. Ranolf and Amohia. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1963. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III: 1826–1832, ed. William H. Gilman and Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1964. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II: 1836– 1838, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1966. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VI: 1824–1838, ed. Ralph H. Orth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ense, Karl August Varnhagen von. 1861. Tagebücher: Erster Band. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus. ———. 1865. Tagebücher: Siebenter Band. Zürich: Meyer & Zeller. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1854. The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans. London: John Chapman. Fox, Caroline. 1882. Memories of Old Friends, ed. H.N. Pym, 2nd ed., 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Gérando, Joseph Marie de. 1804. Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, 4 vols. Paris: Henrichs. Gissing, George. 1983. Workers in the Dawn, ed. Pierre Coustillas. Brighton: Harvester Press. Haight, Gordon S. (ed.). 1954a. The George Eliot Letters: Volume I: 1836–1851. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1954b. The George Eliot Letters: Volume II: 1852–1858. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1956. The George Eliot Letters: Volume V: 1869–1873. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1969. George Eliot and John Chapman, 2nd ed. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Hallam, Arthur Henry. 1834. Remains in Verse and Prose. London: W. Nicol. Hardy, Thomas. 1985. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Volume 1, ed. Lennart A. Björk. London: Macmillan. ———. 2009. The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hare, Augustus J.C. 1872. Memorials of a Quiet Life, Volume 1, 2nd ed. London: Strahan & Co. Hare, Julius. 1835. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Opium-Eater. British Magazine 7: 15–27. Hare-Naylor, Francis. 1807. Theodore, Or, the Enthusiast, 4 vols. Longman et al.

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Hartmann, Eduard von. 1884. Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland, 3 vols. London: Trübner. Head, Edmund Walker [E.W.H.]. 1833. On Affectation in Ancient and Modern Art. The Philological Museum 2: 93–100. Henderson, J. Scot. 1870. Schelling’s Life and Letters. Fortnightly Review 8 (November): 504–516. ———. 1872. Mr. G.H. Lewes on Schelling and Hegel. Contemporary Review 20: 529–542. Hill, Alan G. (ed.). 1979. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume V The Later Years Part II, 1829–1834, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hughes, Kathryn. 1999. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. London: Fourth Estate. Klein, Georg Michael. 1805. Beiträge zum Studium der Philosophie als Wissenschaft des All. Würzburg: Baumgärtnerischen Buchhandlung. Laughton, John Knox. 1883. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, 2 vols, 2nd ed. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Lewes, George Henry. 1837. The Student. National Magazine and Monthly Critic 1: 4–12; 2: 95–109. ———. 1842. Hegel’s Aesthetics. The British and Foreign Review 13: 1–49. ———. 1843. Spinoza’s Life and Works. The Westminster Review 39: 372–407. ———. 1846. Biographical History of Philosophy: Volumes III and IV. London: Charles Knight & Co. ———. 1995. The Letters of George Henry Lewes, Volume 1, ed. William Baker. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1857. Prose Works, 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Lushington, Edmund Law. 1841. Review of W.H. Mill’s Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the Gospel. British and Foreign Review 12: 515–542. Lytton, Edward Bulwer. 1844. Poems and Ballads of Schiller. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. Mackintosh, James. 1813. Review of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. Edinburgh Review 22: 198–238. Marx, Karl. 1983. Letter to Engels. In Marx Engels Collected Works, 50 vols, vol. 39, 227. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mattheisen, Paul F., Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas (eds.). 1992. The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume Three: 1886–1888. Athens: Ohio University Press. Medwin, Thomas. 1843. Lady Singleton, or the World as It Is, 3 vols. London: Cunningham & Mortimer.

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Montgomery, Baroness Jemima Tautphoeus. 1850. The Initials: A Novel, 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley. Morley, Edith J. 1929. Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800–1805. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noel, Roden. 1872. The Philosophy of Perception: Berkeley and Kant. Contemporary Review 20: 72–103. ———. 1902. Collected Poems, ed. Victoria Buxton. London: Kegan Paul. Nye, Eric W. 2015. John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830–1831. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Patmore, Coventry. 1847. Schelling’s Philosophy of Art. The Critic 5 (1 May): 337–338. ———. 1849. Ethics of Art. British Quarterly Review 10 (November): 441–462. Paulin, Roger. 1987. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge. Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9 (2): 174–193. Peterson, William S. 1979. Browning’s Trumpeter: The Correspondence of Robert Browning and Frederick J. Furnivall, 1872–1889. Washington, DC: Decatur House Press. Plitt, Gustav Leopold. 1869. Aus Schellings Leben, in Briefen, 3 vols. Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag. Reeve, Henry. 1842. Characteristics of Painters, 2nd ed. London: John Murray. Robberds, J.W. 1843. A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Roberts, Morley. 1892. The Reputation of George Saxon and Other Stories. London: Cassell. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London: Macmillan. Rogerson, John W. 1992. W.M.L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Schelling, F.W.J. 1843. The Introductory Lecture at Berlin. The Dial 11 (January): 398–404. ———. 1845. The Philosophy of Art: An Oration on the Relation Between the Plastic Arts and Nature, trans. A. Johnson. London: John Chapman. ———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1984. Bruno, or On the Nature and Divine Principle of Things, trans. Michael G. Vater. Albany: SUNY Press. Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich. 1835. The Philosophy of History, trans. James Burton Robertson, 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley. Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred. 1889. Caroline Schlegel and Her Friends. London: T. F. Unwin.

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Sidgwick, Arthur, and Eleanor Mildred Sidgewick. 1906. Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir. London: Macmillan and Co. Smith, Henry Boynton. 1845. A Sketch of German Philosophy. Bibliotheca Sacra 2 (May): 260–292. Stafford, Jane, and Mark Williams. 2006. Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Stanley, A.P. 1844. The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 2 vols. London: B. Fellowes. ———. 1855. Archdeacon Hare. The Quarterly Review 97: 1–28. Sterling, John. 1848. Essays and Tales, ed. Julius Hare, 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. Strauss, David Friedrich. 1846. The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. Marian Evans. London: John Chapman. Sully, James. 1877. Pessimism: A History and Criticism. London: Henry S. King & Co. Symonds, John Addington. 1897. Roden Noel. In The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: Volume 6, ed. Alfred H. Miles. London: Hutchinson & Co. Tennemann, Wilhelm Gottlieb. 1832. A Manual of the History of Philosophy. trans. Arthur Johnson. Oxford: D.A. Talboys. Thirlwall, Connop. 1881. Letters Literary and Theological, ed. J.J. Stewart Perowne and Louis Stokes. London: Richard Bentley. Thomson, James. 1881. Essays and Phantasies. London: Reeves and Turner. ———. 1884. Shelley. London: Charles Whittingham and Co. Todd, R. Larry. 2003. Mendelssohn: A Life in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trench, Richard Chenevix. 1888. Letters and Memorials, ed. Maria Trench. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Waller, John O. 1986. A Circle of Friends: The Tennysons and the Lushingtons of Park House. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wellek, René. 1965. Confrontations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wiley, Raymond A. 1971. John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm: A Correspondence 1832–1852. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

CHAPTER 7

Schelling and British Theology

The supposed isolation of British theology during the first half of the nineteenth century has been much discussed. According to these standard narratives, it was not until the publication of Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu in 1835, Eliot’s English translation in 1846, or perhaps even the arrival of the Essays and Reviews in 1860, that the impact of German philosophy or higher criticism was widely felt in mainstream British theological circles. But as this chapter will demonstrate, the number of figures engaging with Schelling, whether directly by listening to his lectures in person or studying his writings, or diffusely, through the work of other German theologians, suggests that the reality was more nuanced. The picture of Schelling’s reception in nineteenth-century British theology is not a coherent one: he was both championed and attacked in almost equal measures by all quarters simultaneously. Perhaps this is partly owing to the problem of where exactly one should locate the importance of Schelling’s religious philosophy: in his early Naturphilosophie, with its associations of pantheism and monism, or, as Paul Tillich would later maintain, in the positive philosophy? In this later phase, Schelling sought to consider in more detail key theological questions including the problem of evil, the freedom of the will, and doctrinal Christianity, seeking to ground the Christian faith in his own contributions to Trinitarian thinking. The question is of added difficulty given the context for the transmission of these different perspectives: Coleridge, for instance, had been only aware of the early phases of this shift to positive philosophy in the Freiheitsschrift and Über die © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_7

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Gottheiten von Samothrake. Coleridge’s break with Schelling over theological questions must therefore be contextualised as a partial response to only a perceived aspect of Schelling’s thought. Likewise, throughout the great silence of Schelling’s career, the impact of the emphasis on the trinity which he developed during his lectures on the philosophy of revelation would have been limited to those who had heard him personally in Munich or in Berlin. Consequently, nineteenth-century British theological responses to Schelling can be separated broadly into three kinds: an engagement with Schelling’s pantheism and monism which was receptive (the middle period of Coleridge), an engagement with positive philosophy based on first-hand knowledge of hearing Schelling lecture (Hare, Maurice, Cairns), or a more polemic response to his supposed pantheism (Martineau, Liddon). This later response was marked by a kind of straw man argumentation, but also led to some confusing theological contentions, where better informed commentators ended up pitting their understanding of positive philosophy against a Schelling that amounted to a kind of spectral revenant of Romantic pantheism. It is partly owing to the different ‘Schellings’ being variously brought into play during the period that the British reception became riddled throughout with seemingly irreconcilable inconsistencies, so that the German’s thought was allied on the one hand with Unitarians and on the other with the Trinitarians. This chapter will focus on these different interpretations of Schelling, and strategic deployments of his proper name, in the theological debates that threatened to overwhelm the Anglican tradition, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Anglo-Coleridgeans: Schelling and the Broad Church Movement In those infamous passages of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge had initially claimed to introduce the ‘coincidences’ of his thought with Schelling ‘in reference to the work which I have announced in a preceding page’ (1984: 1: 161): the unfinished Magnum Opus, in which Coleridge had dreamed of finally resolving Christian thought and justifying it to his readers. Indeed, given the structure of the Biographia, in which chapter 12, meditating on the System and a pantheistic monism, seems to offer a prolegomena to the theistic formulation of chapter 13 (Harding 1985: 70–72), Coleridge’s readers in the second decade of the

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nineteenth century may have had just cause in assuming that his theology rested on his reading of Schelling. Of course, the Magnum Opus never materialised, and not simply because, as Ferrier had quipped, Schelling had gone ‘silent’ in the intervening years (1840: 296), but while the Aids to Reflection (1825) and the posthumously published Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840) began to answer some of the questions regarding Coleridge’s orthodoxy and theological philosophy, the fragmentary and unsystematic nature of these works meant that Coleridge’s own contribution to British religious thought became contentious and ill-understood during the period. In point of fact, Coleridge’s own religious position underwent various modifications during his career. He had been attracted by Schelling’s pantheism during his middle period, culminating in the Biographia, and that he should have been so enamoured is of little surprise: as early as 1798, he had strongly considered taking up a position as a Unitarian minister, becoming a leading candidate for the vacant pulpit at Shrewsbury, before Josiah Wedgwood II (1769–1843), another Unitarian, gave him an equal salary to continue in his poetic endeavours.1 However, in the years following the Biographia, Coleridge engaged critically with Schelling’s pantheism, and his religious thought developed from a kind of Unitarianism into a Triunitarianism. In a letter to Joseph Henry Green, 30 September 1818, Coleridge says that having been ‘carefully re-perusing the first part of Schelling’s Einleitung […] I seem to see clearly the rotten parts and the vacua of his foundation’ (1959: 873), accusing Schelling of ‘Hylozoic Atheism’ (874).2 Admitting that until recently Coleridge had been ‘myself taken in by it, retrograding from my own prior and better Lights’ (874), he developed his ideas in his Notebooks: ‘I detect two fundamental errors of Schelling. – 1. the establishment of Polarity in the Absolute – and 2. the confusion of Ideas, with Theorums on one side, and  Anticipations on the other.’ In his Naturphilosophie, Schelling, as Aristotle before him, had resorted to the fiction of ‘Entelechies, or Imaginary simple actions – to which all Nature would be reduced, if it were reducible to its primary constituents. Thus we have impossible realities, nay, worse, hyperousian realising powers, that yet are impossible!’ (1973: #4449). The problem, as Coleridge put it in a marginal note to Crabb Robinson’s copy of the Einleitung, dating to this same period of his work with Green, was that Schelling was guilty of ‘a frequent confusion of what is necessary for his system and what is

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necessary in itself’ (1998: 380). In the letter to Green, Coleridge puts it as follows: ‘The divine Unity is indeed the indispensable CONDITION of this Polarity; but both its formal and its immediate, specific CAUSE is in the contradictory WILL of the Apostasy’ (1959: 874–875). It is ultimately this question of will that was the central motivating factor behind Coleridge’s rejection of Schelling’s theology.3 As Anthony John Harding has argued, Where Coleridge differed from the pantheistic position was in affirming […] what the pantheists would deny, namely the very possibility of knowledge, of the “coincidence of an object with a subject”, the meeting of Nature and Self, must point to the prior existence of a being who is not comprehended either in nature or in Intelligence. (1985: 71)

In making Nature absolute, Coleridge believed that Schelling missed the fact that even Intelligent Nature cannot will. As he wrote in a later notebook entry, dating to 1827, ‘in an Eternal Self-comprehending ONE there is the ineffable WILL that created the World’, and so ‘the Personality of the Creator, and the Creative Act of the Divine Person’ are essential to any understanding of ‘the Deity as the Universal Ground’ (2002: #5556). In point of fact, Coleridge’s attack on his theology, developed during the period of his ‘silence’, came to anticipate a number of Schelling’s own theological objections to his youthful Naturphilosophie. In this sense, Ferrier had it backwards: Coleridge shows his genius precisely because he had no knowledge of Schelling’s own contemporaneous turn to positive philosophy, since he too was enacting a parallel turn away from a monism which risked a pantheistic atheism. As Schelling argued in the Freiheitsschrift, God manifests Himself through his freedom: ‘it is the yearning the eternal One feels to give birth to himself’ (2006: 28; SW I.7, 359). Schelling’s point is similar to Coleridge’s regarding the primacy of the will, and both thinkers independently focus on the problem of God’s genesis, Schelling in the Weltalter, and Coleridge in his letters and notebooks. Like Schelling, Coleridge comes to consider the way in which the Christian Trinity manifests the process of God’s selfmanifestation in the world as such. The difference in their conceptions lies less in the ways in which both Schelling and Coleridge historicise the Christian trinity in a premonition of process theology,4 than in the fact that while the Trinity remains essentially Trinitarian in Schelling’s idea of

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God as three potencies, Coleridge came to consider the process instead as a kind of Tectractys. As early as 1817, in his marginalia to Schelling’s Philosophie und Religion, Coleridge comments that ‘if I do not deceive myself, the truth, which Sch. here toils in and after […] is far more intelligibly and adequately presented in my Scheme or Tetraxy’ (1998: 400). The italics here perhaps registers Coleridge’s sense of another uncanny echo, that of the phrasing of the Biographia Literaria, published the same year as the marginal note was likely written, in which Coleridge had offhandedly announced that it was in Schelling that he had ‘first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself’ (1984: 1: 160). But his Triunitarian idea was best explicated in the later fragment ‘On the Trinity’, dating from 1833,5 the penultimate year of his life. For Coleridge, ‘the one and triune God’ develops through four moments: IDENTITY: The absolute Subjectivity […] which is essentially causative of all possible true being - Ground and Cause. = The Absolute WILL […]. But that which is essentially Causative of all Being must be causative of its own […]. Thence IPSËITY:  The eternally self-affirmant, self-affirmed […]. But the Absolute WILL, the Absolute Good, in the eternal act of Self-affirmation, […] co-eternally begets the divine ALTERITY:  The Supreme BEING. […] The Supreme Reason […]. The Son. The Word. whose attribute is the TRUE […] and whose Definition, the PLEROMA of Being, whose essential poles are Unity and Distinctity; or the essential Infinite in the form of the Finite […] But with the relatively Subjective, and the relatively Objective, the great Idea needs only for its completion a co-eternal which is both […]. Hence, the COMMUNITY: The eternal LIFE, which is LOVE ‑ the Spirit; relatively to the Father, the Spirit of Holiness, the Holy Spirit: relatively to the Son, the Spirit of Truth whose attribute is Wisdom. […] The Good in the form reality of the True, in the form of actual Life = Wisdom. (1995: 1510–1512)

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As Coleridge’s notebooks demonstrate, this idea of a Tectractys was one which he had been developing sporadically from 1825 onwards (1990: #5233), and which he meditated upon at length during 1830 (2002: #6320, #6454, #6494, #6552, #6574). If the philosophical significance of Coleridge’s ideas, like those of Schelling during the same period, are difficult to effectively estimate owing to the fact that they often went unpublished, we can be sure that he spoke liberally on these questions with his circle of friends during his later years. It is in this sense that Mark Pattison (1813–1884), who had ‘fallen under the influence’ of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in 1837 while an undergraduate at Oriel (1885: 164), could write in Essays and Reviews (1860) that ‘theology had almost died out when it received a new impulse and a new direction from Coleridge’ (1861: 263). Coleridge’s disciples included Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, Maurice, Sterling and Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), amongst others. This was the so-called the ‘Germano-Coleridgean’ school which James Harrison Rigg (1821–1909), the Wesleyan Methodist minister, would later criticise in works such as Modern Anglican Theology (1859), and which he would link also to the theology of Jowett and Stanley. If this school was influential on the progress of modern Anglican theology, as Rigg’s title suggests, its influence was not unilaterally welcomed, as he noted later: Pity that in these times such teachers as Coleridge, Maurice, and Kingsley, should have been trying to lead men back from the day-light which for three centuries has been spreading broadly over the face of Christendom, to the clouds and darkness which the night of heathenism had left behind, which so long hung over the morn of Christianity. (1866: 354)

Rigg continues by explicitly naming Schelling as the person who had led these Anglo-Coleridgeans astray, figures who, ‘refusing to receive as final the authority of the Word of God’, ‘find no end, in wandering mazes lost’, quoting Milton’s Paradise Lost (ii.561). It is true that these writers all refer to Schelling with some frequency in their theological writings. In Kingsley’s 1854 lectures on Alexandria and her Schools, delivered at the Philosophical Institute in Edinburgh, he bemoans the ‘popular delusions’ about Schelling, and praises the lead that Scotland was taking in rehabilitating his thought (1854: 84), singling out Carlyle’s work as pioneering, but also nodding to William Smith (1816–1896), present in the audience, who had recently

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published translations of Fichte with John Chapman (1848). Maurice, who, as we shall see, would discuss Schelling’s philosophy in detail in his attack on Mansel’s theological agnosticism, also showed his interest in the subject in his treatise on Modern Philosophy (1862). Maurice’s historical approach considered Schelling’s philosophy a child ‘born of the revolution’ (1862: 655), and he defended him against the charge of atheism by reference to the philosophy of ‘revelation’. While Maurice admits that his grasp of the later stages of Schelling’s philosophy was not total, the fact that his defence turned to positive philosophy testifies to a more nuanced position than many of his contemporaries held during the period. Maurice ultimately recommends Schelling for pointing towards ‘that which is, or Him who is, above all systems – to the only ground as well as the only end of knowledge’ (1862: 656). Hare, of course, had heard Schelling lecture on the philosophy of revelation in person in Munich. In his notes to his lectures on the Mission of the Comforter, published in 1846, Hare refers to Paulus’s recent bootlegged transcription of the Philosophie der Offenbarung (1842), and makes it eminently clear where his sympathies lie: In the recent piratical publication of Schelling’s Lectures, by which one of the shallowest and noisiest babblers in German theology has been disgracing the decline of his life, an ingenious comparison is traced between the character of the Church of Rome and that of St. Peter. (1846: 2: 400)

Hare develops the idea, marking one of the earliest published considerations in English of the distinctions between the Pauline and Petrine churches in Schelling’s late philosophy. And while Hare’s interest was linked to Schelling directly here (either from his own memory, or from its recent jogging by Paulus’ publication), it is worth noting, once again, the ways in which Coleridge had, apparently quite independently, also begun to mediate upon the distinction between the theological implications of Petrine and Pauline theology.

German ‘Heresies’: Schelling and Anglo-Catholicism The Germano-Coleridgeans such as Hare and Maurice broadly identified with those groups of latitudinarians known as the Broad Church movement, which argued for a more inclusive form of Anglicanism in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the course of considering

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the Eucharist in his Theological Essays (1853), Maurice argued that the standard English reader was essentially uninterested alike in ‘theories about transubstantiation or consubstantiation, Romanist dogmas or transcendental dogmas, Le Maistre or Schelling’ (283): rather, what united them was the desire for a personal experience of and relationship with the divine. Maurice, however, was overstating the case, for the preceding two decades or so had seen a massive theological debate over the status, direction and inclusiveness of the Anglican Church, attacked from both sides. But of equal interest is his attempt in this passage to mark off Schelling from Catholicism. The move was at once rhetorical and theological: Maurice sought to claim Schelling’s philosophy for a form of, admittedly ‘transcendental’, Protestantism, while simultaneously distancing him from Catholicism, here emblematised by the figure of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), the French conservative theologian. Maurice’s rhetorical move is important, since a great number of British writers during the period tended to misunderstand Schelling’s supposed ‘mysticism’ as Catholicism, an idea which lay behind Browning’s Bishop Blougram. In point of fact, of course, Schelling never converted to Catholicism, as Coleridge had feared (1959: 883). This was a point which another of the Germano-Coleridgeans, Sterling, had reflected on with pleasure (1848: 1: 414–415), while Crabb Robinson had earlier recalled being delighted to find that he had been ‘wrong in supposing [Schelling] to have become a Roman Catholic’ (1869: 2: 446) when they met at Carlsbad in 1829. The association of Schelling’s philosophy with Catholicism, however, was not simply limited to a misunderstanding of its supposed ‘transcendentalism’, ‘mysticism’ or ‘Romanticism’, for, from the very beginnings of the Oxford Movement, the Tractarians and AngloCatholics, led by Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Henry Newman worked in an atmosphere informed by the writings of Schelling. Pusey was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel in 1823, and was close friends with both Newman and John Keble (1792–1866), also Fellows at the college. In 1825, he had visited Germany, studying theology at Göttingen. There he met Karl Friedrich Eichhorn (1781–1854) (1789–1850), August Tholuck (1799–1877), Bunsen, Neander and Schleiermacher, and later, Hegel in Berlin (Liddon 1893: 1: 71–87, 158). He became correspondents with Schleiermacher, ‘that great man’, he put it, ‘who, whatever be the errors of his system, has done more than any other […] for the restoration of religious belief in Germany’ (Liddon 1893: 1: 82), and friends with Bunsen. When Bunsen travelled

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to England in 1838, he would stay in Oxford with Pusey, who was by then Regius Professor of Hebrew (Bunsen 1868: 1: 462–463). A year later, on 13 February 1839, Bunsen recalled ‘din[ing] with the Puseys, and read[ing] the MS. of Schelling to him till twelve’ (1: 503). Precisely which manuscript he referred to is unclear.6 A week or so later, Bunsen likewise notes ‘an interesting conversation at breakfast about Rothe’s magnificent development of the idea of the Church in St. Paul and on Schelling’ (1: 508), presumably referring to the recently published Die Anfänge der christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung [The Origins of the Christian Church and Its Constitution] by Richard Rothe (1799–1867). These breakfasts were a constant source of pleasure for Bunsen, who wrote in his diary: Breakfasted with Pusey upon ham and speculative philosophy. I wish I could give you an adequate idea of the speculative talent and depth of Pusey. There is no Englishman I know who has studied the subject so much; he takes in Schelling as easily as Plato. (1868: 1: 509)

But in spite of Bunsen’s enthusiasm, it is worth noting that Pusey was not unilaterally positive in his appreciation of Schelling. For instance, the same year he first entertained Bunsen, Pusey would have cause to dismiss Schelling’s theology as ‘Pantheism’ (1838: 122–123). Later, Pusey speaks occasionally of a friend who, ‘entangled in the philosophy of Schelling which he had studied carefully, […] thought that he could never again believe in a miracle’ (1879: iii; compare 1872: 75; 1898: 146), perhaps even alluding here to Bunsen. Regardless, the language suggests that Pusey by this date held a somewhat standard, negative reaction to the supposedly atheistic conclusions of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. But Pusey’s very first published work, An Historical Enquiry Into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany (1828), gives us cause to pause and consider the ways in which a key figure in the movement which was to later to develop into Anglo-Catholicism gave a fierce defence of the theology of Schelling. This Historical Enquiry was itself a response to Hugh James Rose’s State of Protestantism in Germany (1825). Rose (1795–1838) had travelled to Germany in the hope of improving his health in 1824, and upon his return, gave a four lectures as select preacher at the University of Cambridge, published the following year, and in which he associated

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German ‘rationalism’ with contemporary latitudinarian impulses in Anglicanism. Rose characterises Schelling as ‘mystical’ (1825: 97–101), and while he was open and almost unapologetic about his ‘imperfect knowledge’ (102) of his philosophy, he devoted a number of pages to the implications of Schelling’s theology. Rose elides Schelling’s Natur- and Identitätsphilosophie alike in an undifferentiated transcendental mess, and the only texts to which he refers are the Methode (1825: 165, 171–172) and Philosophie und Religion (1825: 172), but his knowledge was not particularly detailed, and otherwise seemed to be limited to what he gleaned from de Staël (1825: 170). Pusey’s attack on Rose in his Enquiry charges him with a basic ignorance both of the actual details of Schelling’s philosophy, and of the ways in which German theology had incorporated his insights in order to strengthen the foundations of the Protestant faith.7 Pusey, of course, was not yet an author of one of the Tracts for the Times, and had not yet cause to break from Anglicanism: he was writing from the perspective of a committed Protestant, but one who was more open to borrowing insights from other disciplines in order to develop his own theological perspective. In this sense, Pusey in the Enquiry might be termed a kind of Vermittlungstheologe. He was corresponding during the period with Karl Heinrich Sack (1789–1875), the evangelical theologian who had studied under Schleiermacher and was associated with the movement of Vermittlungstheologie [mediation theology], which sought to develop a coherent Protestantism informed by insights from the natural sciences, idealist philosophy, and historical Biblical criticism. Pusey opens his Enquiry by quoting a letter he had received from Sack, for whom Rose had ‘failed to perceive the necessary course of development of German theology’: ‘He names the philosophy of Schelling, yet almost as if all the impulses in Religion and the Church […] were derived from the suspicious source of mystical philosophemata’ (1828: xi–xii). Pusey argues for precisely the opposite position to Rose: The system of Schelling produced indirectly as well as directly a great revolution; while the activity and independence of mind, which it much contributed to rouse, precluded those parts within itself, from which danger might be apprehended to the Christian system, from exerting that universal influence which the Kantian philosophy had exercised, it excited a vivid consciousness of the universal presence and agency of a living and infinite being. (1828: 169)

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Schelling’s immanent philosophy served to ‘overthrow the dead barren idea of an epicurean deity at a distance from, and without connection with, the world’ and ‘awakened a deeper mode of seeking after knowledge’ than Kant had done (1828: 169). Far from constituting a pantheism, Pusey quotes the words of the contemporary German theologian, August Twesten (1789–1876), who would later succeed Schleiermacher at Berlin in 1835. Schelling’s philosophy has anticipated a deeper meaning in the ideas of the Christian Theology, which had been entirely concealed from the common view. To many it has been a point of transition to a Christian conviction; to many it has restored the courage to undertake a scientific defence of Christianity, and has exerted an influence favourable to it even upon systems at variance with itself. (Pusey 1828: 170; quoting Twesten 1826: 1: 198)

Even if Pusey later came to reconsider the tone of his attack on Rose, withdrawing the Enquiry from circulation in the mid-1830s, the incident shows both that he was happy to come to Schelling’s defence, seeing in his philosophy the promise of a newly mediated Christianity. Newman, for his part, was less enamoured with Schelling. In his introduction to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1838), Newman attacks Germany’s ‘rationalism’ in formulaic and polemic terms, suggesting that in an earlier age, ‘Romanism’ might have been ‘considered as the most dangerous corruption of the gospel’, and a rallying cry for Anglicans to come together: ‘But at this day, when the connexion of foreign Protestantism with infidelity is so evident, what claim has the former on our sympathy?’ (1838: 25). But in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Newman points out an essential kindred of spirit between his thought and contemporary developments in German theology: ‘The same philosophical elements, received into a certain sensibility or insensibility to sin and its consequences, leads one mind to the Church of Rome; another to what, for want of a better word, may be called Germanism’ (1845: 71). In point of fact, however, we have little evidence of Newman having read contemporary German theology, and while his notebooks shows that he was reading Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus’ (1796–1862) Historische Entwicklung der spekulativen Philosophie [Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy] (1837) in 1860, Newman concludes that ‘I do not think that I am bound to

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read [Schelling] in spite of [what] Chalybaus says, for notoriously [he has] come to no conclusions’ (1969: 2: 90). A friend of Newman’s was William Palmer (1811–1879) who graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1831, before entering into college life as a Tutor, and becoming something of a sympathiser with the Oxford Movement. Today, he is best remembered for his visits to Russia where he met leading theologians of the Orthodox Church, such as Fedor Fedorovich Sidonskii (1805–1873), whose Vvedenie v nauku filosofii [Introduction to the Science of Philosophy] (1833) had sought to establish a tradition of philosophical science independent from theology. Palmer’s records show that Russia was alive with German transcendentalism during the 1840s and 1850s. Sidonskii ‘understands all the modern German and French philosophers better than any man in Russia’, and Father Fortunatoff, who Palmer stayed with, opined positively on Schelling while disparaging other German philosophers (1882: 300). Not all Russian theologians were as positive towards Schelling, however. In his Appeal to the Scottish Bishops and Clergy (1849), written when he began courting the Church north of the border after his own High Church leanings began to be seen as too radical for mainstream Anglicanism, Palmer quoted the poet and philosopher Aleksey Khomyakov (1804–1860), who had visited him in Oxford in 1847, and who held up the strength of the Russian Orthodox tradition as an example to Scottish Calvinism. While ‘Romanism, though seemingly active, has received the deadly blow from its own lawful child, Protestantism’, it too ‘has heard its knell rung by its most distinguished teachers’, such as ‘Schelling in his Preface to the Posthumous Works of Stephens’. It is ‘the Ark of Orthodoxy’ only, Khomyakov asserts, that ‘rides safe and unhurt through storms and billows’ (1849: 397–398). If the popular consciousness unsympathetically charged Schelling’s mysticism with a kind of ‘heresy’, then the Anglo-Catholic tradition itself was not entirely sure what to make of him. Perhaps, in this sense, the most fascinating British response to the topic of Schelling and Catholicism came in a paper on ‘Schelling’s Lectures on Christianity’, published in the British Magazine in May 1833. Signed ‘R.’, the author was likely Rose, who had founded the British Magazine in 1832. It gives a sketch of Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of revelation that were delivered in Munich the previous year, regarding the development between the Petrine principle of obedience, the Pauline principle of protestation, and the Johannine principle of love. The news derived

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from the authority of ‘an intelligent foreigner’, and Rose suggests that ‘a fund of thought’ was offered by Schelling’s lectures (1833: 521). He announces himself pleased that such a topic should be broached by ‘a man so celebrated as Schelling’ (1833: 522), and notes that his ‘informant (himself a Roman Catholic) possesses, and is about to publish, the minutes of a conversation between Schelling and La Mennais on the subject of the present divided state of Christian Europe’ (1833: 522). On this basis, Rose’s informant seems almost certain to have been Alexis-François Rio (1797–1874), the French art writer, and it seems possible that he would have met Rio through Whewell, who had himself met him the year beforehand.8 Rio did not, in point of fact, publish the minutes of this conversation for many years: his 1835 De la poésie chrétienne (a book widely read in Britain and influential on John Ruskin [1819–1900]) did not cover the meeting, and it was only forty years later that Rio’s recollections of the meeting between Schelling and the French Catholic philosopher Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854) would be published in his autobiography, Epilogue à l’art chrétien (1872). Dated by Rio to 28 August 1832, the two discussed the possibility of uniting European Christianity in a new Church of the future which Schelling claimed would be ‘founded on an invincible conviction, which would be the development of science, and which would come to replace the faith’ (1872: 2: 168). Lamennais countered that such an ideal could never be ‘effected without concessions on both parts, on the side of the Roman Catholics and of the Protestants also’ (1833: 522; compare Rio 1872: 2: 169–170). And while this rapprochement between Catholicism and Protestant never materialised, Rose had never really given the idea a great deal of credence, noting that ‘the hopes of an union here alluded to are, it is to be feared, a mere dream’. Regardless, Rose finds himself ‘rejoicing’ at the news that ‘Schelling is a sincere and earnest Christian’ (1833: 522), perhaps unsurprising given his earlier attacks on Schelling’s ‘heretical’ theology.

Schelling’s Dissidence Schelling’s supposed ‘dream’ of a union of Catholicism and Protestantism in a unified new Christian faith of the future, founded on the Johannine principle of love, finds a kind of echo in the latitudinarian impulse of the Broad Church movement, who had sought to open Anglicanism up to the Dissenters. But it was not simply the

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Anglo-Coleridgeans and Tractarians who tried to claim Schelling for their own. Across the nineteenth century, we find that key figures in the Dissenting traditions also came to seek a measure of philosophical justification by invoking the name of Schelling to their cause. We have already seen in Chapter 3 how significant ground had been laid philosophically for the British reception of Schelling north of the border by Hamilton. Theologically, too, Scotland proved fertile ground for Schelling’s ideas to flourish. Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788–1870), who is today remembered for his attempted revision of Calvinism with his ally John McLeod Campbell (1800–1870), was highly influential, not least on Maurice. He also met Schelling personally. In a letter to Jane Stirling (1804–1859), the pianist and student of Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), dated 31 August 1846 and written from Carlsbad, Erskine writes: Schelling is here – I know him and like him very well, but cannot get much out of him – he says he is here to drink the waters, and not to make out propositions, and that he must avoid everything that would trouble his head […] I spoke to Schelling about Carlyle – he said he could not tolerate his style [but] he thought a great deal of Coleridge, he spoke of him as a great genius. (Horrocks 2004: 229)

The phrasing (‘I know him very well’) suggests that this was not their first meeting, and Erskine also showed some knowledge of Schelling as early as 1838, when he wrote to Alexander John Scott (1805–1866), the Manchester Unitarian and later first principal of Owens College. He had heard Charles Guisan defend his dissertation at Lausanne, where he had spoken positively of Schelling (1884: 231). But while Erskine would have had a great deal of sympathy with the Johannine emphasis in Schelling’s later theology, the extent of the influence or their prior acquaintance is difficult to estimate. Likewise, Thomas Wright (1785–1855), minister of Borthwick, Scotland, a very popular preacher, who Walter Scott had travelled to hear preach in 1828 (Lockhart 1838: 7: 112). In his True Plan of a Living Temple (1830), Wright shows that he was reading Schelling, appending a note to explain his Identitätsphilosophie. While he admits Schelling’s supposed monism proved difficult to ratify with his own branch of Calvinism, Wright acknowledges the diffuse influence of ‘many luminous views, leading

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to the principles explained in the present Work, [which] may be found through the writings of this great author’ (1830: 3: 279). One important Scottish theological figure for whom the situation is easier to apprise is John Cairns (1818–1892), minister of the United Presbyterian church. Cairns had studied under both Wilson and Hamilton at Edinburgh, before enrolling in Secession Church Divinity Hall. In 1843, Cairns travelled to Berlin, becoming a part of a coterie of Scottish students there including John Nelson, the younger brother of William (1816–1887), who ran the Edinburgh publishing firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, Alexander Wallace (1810–1890), the author of The Bible and the Working Classes (1853), and John Logan Aikman (1820–1885), later Moderator of the United Presbyterian Church. There, Cairns impressed his German hosts both theologically and philosophically, and before he returned to Scotland, he was offered a lectureship in philosophy at Halle and the position as minister of a dissenting chapel in Hamburg (MacEwan 1895: 152). In a letter to the chemist George Wilson (1818–1859), under whom he had studied at Edinburgh, Cairns writes of Schelling as a ‘majestic codicil’ to his studies at Berlin: A magnificent scene it was, a thundering crowd, tremendous noise before his appearance, and by far the most excited interest I have yet seen among German students. Then, long after the hour, came in the philosopher himself, a venerable, grey-haired man, but stout, almost ruddy, with a great deal of plainness in his appearance, and a face as like as you can conceive to that of a decent Scotch tradesman in his Sunday dress. (MacEwan 1895: 156)

Cairns seeks to claim something of Schelling for his homeland, for ‘the physiognomy – high cheek-bones, mouth, chin and temples – is thoroughly Scottish’, and he figures ‘a cheerfully sedate old man, [who] might stand with great credit at the “plate” of a Secession church’. Philosophically, however, perhaps because he had caught him at his most ‘mysterious’ (‘he is dealing with the highest categories of the Absolute’), Cairns finds that, with ‘the edge of my curiosity’ having been ‘greatly blunted by the younger Fichte’s full and solid history of recent philosophy, […] he is now likely to be to me a phenomenon rather than an authority’ (MacEwan 1895: 156).9 If Wilson was too analytical himself to give much credence to German Naturphilosophie, he was happy to hear of Schelling through Cairns, writing in reply that ‘I have no wish

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you should displace Schelling or Neander in your descriptions, by any of the great physiker. I get enough of them, and need accounts of the others to keep my soul from growing altogether one-sided’ (Wilson 1862: 311). Still, it was precisely Schelling’s ‘mysteriousness’ that caused issues for Cairns. A month later, writing to John Rattray, he opines that ‘the notions of Schelling are so obscure, capricious and rhapsodical that it would not be easy, were one disposed to it, to build on his foundation’. At the same time, however, Schelling had impressed him deeply: His genius should have its praise; and he is now not only reclaimed from the pantheism of his earlier philosophy but united to the orthodox party in the Church, being a personal friend of Neander, and, by the report of the latter, a sincere and earnest believer in the evangelical doctrines. (MacEwan 1895: 157)

Whereas the still-dominant Hegelian school was nothing but ‘a miserable process of logical jugglery’, Schelling at least had sought ‘to ingraft the Christian peculiarities on this barren and poisonous stock’ (MacEwan 1895: 157). Cairns’ friend, James Russell, with whom he had studied in Edinburgh, was also interested in Schelling, having promised Cairns an ‘effusion’ on his ‘summa principia’ in language that suggests the influence of Hamilton and Ferrier. Cairns replies in anticipation (MacEwan 1895: 156), and notes in a letter from Berlin when he was studying with Schelling, the ways in which Carlyle’s ‘theology ethic and aesthetik’ had disputed ‘the assumptions, straits and contradictions’ of Fichte (MacEwan 1895: 162), presumably thinking here of Sartor Resartus, discussed in Chapter 3. While Cairns professes to have little ‘confidence in the soundness’ of Schelling’s ‘reasoning’, charging him with ‘unintelligibility’, ‘the result is gratifying in itself’. Such, at least, was the criticism which Cairns’ ‘dogged Scotch Eigenthumlichkeit [Eigentümlichkeit: peculiarity]’ found apt to pass upon Schelling’s lectures (MacEwan 1895: 162). While Cairns left Berlin inspired more by the attempt than anything that he gained from Schelling’s theology, the experience had been important, and he also discovered that Hamilton’s works had begun to gain a currency in Germany, read, for instance, by Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805–1892), who Cairns met in Halle in May 1844 (MacEwan 1895: 174). But he kept up his association with Germany, seeking to bridge the theological gap between the two countries, and

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was the only Briton to speak at the 1857 Conference at Berlin which brought together leading Christian speakers, with Cairns lecturing without an interpreter on ‘The Probable Influence of Closer Union of German and British Christians on the Theology and Religious Life of the Two Countries’ (Railton 1999: 186–187). He never forgot Schelling or his time as a student in Berlin: when Cairns returned there at the age of seventy-two in 1890, he ‘sought out the class-room where Neander and Schelling lectured in 1843, and sat down at my old seat, two or three benches back on the right of the lecturer’ (MacEwan 1895: 760). South of the border, too, Schelling found receptive readers in the dissenting traditions, such as the congregationalist Samuel Davidson (1806–1898). Born in Ireland, Davidson took the chair of biblical criticism at the Lancashire Independent College in Manchester in 1842. He published his Sacred Hermeneutics the year after, in which he discussed Schelling’s philosophy of mythology and revelation as aspects of the school of the ‘mythic interpretation’ of the scriptures (1843: 210–211), an idea which Davidson was not wholly sympathetic towards, noting that through the application of Schelling’s philosophy, ‘philosophical systems essentially atheistical have been applied to theology’ (1843: 219). Still, Davidson’s umbrage did not stand in the way of his visiting Berlin the year thereafter, when he would hear Schelling lecture (1899: 22). Nevertheless, Schelling found a more welcome reception amongst Unitarians, perhaps unsurprising, given how we have already seen the ways in which Coleridge had sympathised with Unitarianism as a younger man. John James Tayler (1797–1869), minister of Mosley Street Chapel (now Upper Brook Street), Manchester, had been influenced by Romanticism, travelling to the Lake District in 1826 to meet Wordsworth (1872: 1: 72–74). Suffering from a bout of nervous exhaustion, Tayler visited Germany 1834–1835, attending Johann Gieseler’s (1792–1854) lectures in Göttingen, meeting Bunsen and coming under the influence of Schleiermacher. In his retrospect of the Religious Life of England (1845), Tayler discussed the reciprocal influence of English and German ‘Freethinking’ and names Schelling as a figure who had been to Germany ‘what Locke and Hartley were to the earlier Rationalism of England’ (458). Although Tayler would claim only a few months later that he was ‘utterly incompetent to give any opinion about German philosophy’ (1872: 1: 185), he had at least read Schelling’s Methode. Writing to the Liverpool-based Unitarian John Hamilton Thom (1808–1894), one of

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the authors of Unitarianism Defended (1839), and reflecting on a discussion held between Tayler, John Gooch Robberds (1789–1854) and James Martineau, about the future direction of their quarterly meetings, held in Manchester, Tayler proposes they read Schelling’s Methode. Although Tayler admits that Schelling’s text is ‘hardly intelligible […] without some previous knowledge of the distinctions and controversies of German philosophy, with which German theology is intimately inwoven’, he considered the Methode important to promote because it might appeal to students, ‘a class of readers – especially among our younger ministers – which I think we ought not to leave out of view’ (1872: 1: 185). Interestingly, rather than suggesting Schelling be approached via a ‘dry compendium, like that of Tennemann’, Tayler suggests de Wette’s ‘Theodor, giving the history of the doubts and difficulties of a young German theologian, which would place before the reader a tolerably clear and comprehensive statement’ of Schelling’s views (1872: 1: 186). Perhaps it was from Martineau that Tayler had heard of de Wette, for the following year a reviewer in his journal The Christian Teacher (Anon. 1839: 183–185) noted that an American translation of the novel by James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) was currently being prepared (eventually published in 1842), as part of the Boston publisher and transcendentalist George Ripley’s (1802–1880) series of ‘Specimens of Foreign Literature’. The same series, interestingly, was to include a volume on ‘Schelling on the Philosophy of Art; and Miscellanies’, although this never materialised. It was through Martineau, however, that the links between Schelling and British Unitarianism were made most explicit. While the letter from Tayler to Thom and this review article shows that Martineau was aware of Schelling at least from 1838–1839, his own engagement seems to have become more detailed sometime in the mid-1840s. In a review of Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1846), Martineau praises its author, John Daniel Morell (1816–1891), as someone who ‘opens the dreamland of German transcendentalism, shows that it is not without definite and habitable provinces of thought, and gives names to the strange shadows that move through it’ (1869: 2: 138). But in Martineau’s opinion, Morell’s ‘intimacy with the original writers is too slight to render him ripe for the office of their expounder’ (1869: 2: 140), suggesting that by this point, he felt himself sufficiently versed in Schelling in the original language to level such a criticism. Although Martineau remained

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unpersuaded ‘that any lasting influence will be propagated’ by Schelling (1869: 2: 145), ten years later, in his essay on ‘Personal Influences on our Present Theology’ (1856), he noted both the significance of Schelling on the development of Coleridge’s theology, and the continued importance of this ‘border territory between psychology and theology’ (1869: 1: 369) which Schelling’s philosophy had made possible. By the 1880s, certainly, Martineau was reading Schelling closely. In his two volume Study of Religion (1888), Schelling is considered one side of a characteristically nineteenth-century theological divide, with August Comte’s (1798–1857) positivism on the other. While Martineau here shows little sympathy with Schelling’s supposed pantheism, ‘inflating the Reason to the stretch of a monotonous infinitude, virtually emptied already by preaching the nothingness of all it holds’ (1888: 1: x), he demonstrates a close knowledge of the System, Einleitung, Methode and Freiheitsschrift (1: 84–86; 2: 302–304), all cited in German, as well as offering one of the earliest British responses to the American idealist Josiah Royce’s (1855–1916) developments of Schelling in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) (Martineau 1888: 1: 215). A few years earlier, in his Study of Spinoza (1882), Martineau also alluded to an idea developed in the eighth of Schelling’s Philosophische Briefe, asking ‘whether, as Schelling says, “the Absolute is ennuyé with its perfection”?’ (1882: 194; translating SW I.1, 326; HKA I.3, 96). Martineau’s French term translates Schelling’s idea of the ‘unenderlicher Langerweile’, but carried additional connotations in the early 1880s, with the idea of the Absolute’s ‘ennuyé’ almost marking a kind of disinterested aestheticism.

Later Theological Responses In 1838, the future Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone would publish his The State in its Relations with the Church. This work responded to the tumult of the previous few decades, which had seen Dissenters, Radicals and Catholics seek to liberate the Anglican Church from the British State. Arguing instead for a closer relationship between the two, Gladstone would likely have found a confirmation of his views a few months later from Heinrich Abeken (1809–1872), the Prussian Chaplain in Rome. In his diaries of 17 December, Gladstone recalls their conversation at length, reflecting upon the current controversy regarding a Prussian national church. From Abeken, Gladstone learned about how the Prussian government ‘continues sometimes to appoint neologian

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professors of divinity, if learned men – but in every University their opponents have now a stand & the influence of great names is now rather come round’ (1968: 532). Gladstone’s marginalia in his personal copies of books, held now at St. Deniol’s Hawarden, show that he had at least a passing interest in Schelling from around 1833 onwards, when he read de Staël’s De l’Allemagne in French, noting Schelling’s name on the rear flyleaf. And in 1839, with his interest perhaps piqued by Abeken, he read Samuel Wilberforce’s (1805–1873) sermon on The Power of God’s Word Needful for National Education (1838), noting in marginalia on page 19, ‘Schelling - eternal g’. His interest then seemed to wane, before a series of notes written in the 1870s,10 culminating in his reading in 1879 of Andrew Martin Fairbairn’s (1838–1912) Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History, where Gladstone reminds himself that Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie was commended by Fairbairn as ‘a triumphant assertion of the origin of mythology in the religious conceptions of a people’ (1879: 18 n.). That Gladstone was interested in Schelling shows the extent to which his voice had become almost a ‘canonical’ one within midVictorian theological discourse. And Gladstone was not the only future Prime Minister to take an interest in Schelling. In Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804–1881) novel Vivian Grey (1836–1837), the protagonist, often read as an autobiographical portrait of its author, visits Germany as part of his education. There, Mr. Sievers points out the leading philosophers of the age, one of whom had recently published a Treatise on Man under the influence of Schelling, quipping that it is ‘a treatise on a subject in which every one is interested, written in a style which no one can understand’. ‘Schelling has revived pantheism in Germany’, Seivers continues, and ‘according to him, on our death our identity is lost for ever, but our internal qualities become part of the great whole’ (1827: 4: 348). This association of Schelling with pantheism, a prejudice which was political as much as theological, continued throughout the later nineteenth century, in spite of the German’s own movement away from Naturphilosophie in his later life. Mill’s Observations (1840) represented the most thorough-going, if ill-informed, manifestation of this kind of association. Therein, Schelling’s name is invoked as a kind of pantheistic bogeyman: he is at once a kind of shadowy ‘imperfect prelude’ to Strauss (1840: 42), a ‘proud’ inspiration to Schlegel, a ‘bard’ of ‘the one divine Essence and its spiritual recognition’ (113), and a covert Hindu (121). That none of his criticisms were based on even a basic knowledge

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of Schelling’s own works is a point which the Anglo-Coleridgeans made forcibly in coming to Schelling’s defence. Alongside Lushington’s scathing review (discussed in Chapter 6), Hare also had his say: Mill’s attacks on modern German philosophy has frequent occasion to regret that the assailant is not more intimately acquainted with the authors he is assailing, and will think it would have been better that he who professes to teach the English public what great reason they have for abhorring […] Schelling, should at least have read some fair portion of the works he so strongly condemns […]. When we remember however what is the ordinary practice among Englishmen who give vent to their bile and their self-satisfaction in abusing German philosophy and theology, it may not be thought surprising that even such a man as Dr Mill should deem himself warranted in passing sentence without searching into the merits of the case. (1846: 2: 799–800)

Such attacks as these, however, were more the exception than the rule. Even works broadly sympathetic to the idea of pantheism, such as General Sketch of the History of Pantheism (1878) by Constance Plumptre (1848–1929), which sought to treat it as a historical belief system rather than a modern theological alternative, tended to end up hostile to Schelling (2: 196–205). That so many British thinkers remained unwilling or unable to divorce the name of Schelling from the idea of pantheism speaks once again to the question of which version of Schelling each individual faction was responding to and representing. Still, in Biblical scholarship, Schelling’s insights in his philosophies of mythology and revelation began to gain some measure of scholarly respectability. Henry Alford (1810–1871), dean of Canterbury, had travelled to Bonn in 1847 in order to read German, and in his revised edition of his standard New Testament (1866), Alford annotated Hebrews 8:9 with a quotation from Philosophie der Offenbarung (SW II.2, 679); it was Alford’s friend, Charles Merivale (1808–1893), historian and dean of Ely, who had travelled to Bavaria in 1836 and translated Schiller in 1844, who would provide the entries on German theology and philosophy for William Thomas Brande’s (1788–1866) Dictionary of Science, Literature and Art, including the entry for Schelling (1842: 336, 588, 1094–1095). To find established figures from the Anglican community responding in such measured terms shows the extent to which Schelling’s ideas had been assimilated in scholarly British theological discourse.

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The popular discourse of theology was something else, however. One of the most important late nineteenth-century Anglican theologians, Henry Parry Liddon (1829–1890), was broadly hostile to Schelling, discussing his theology regularly in sermons given throughout his career. Liddon had entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1846, the year after Newman’s secession, and had been sympathetic to the Oxford Movement; on a visit to Rome in 1852 George Talbot (1816–1886), chamberlain to Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), even tried to convert him. He was friendly with both Keble and Pusey, who were both moderate in their approach to Schelling, but Liddon used his Bampton Lectures of 1866 to return to the familiar terrain of pantheism. He cites the Methode when attacking Schelling’s interpretation of the doctrine of the incarnation. For Schelling, Christian theology is hopelessly in error, when it teaches that at a particular moment of time God became Incarnate, since God is ‘external to’ all time, and the Incarnation of God is an eternal fact. But Schelling contends that the man Christ Jesus is the highest point or effort of this eternal incarnation, and the beginning of its real manifestation to men: ‘none before Him after such a manner has revealed to man the Infinite.’ (1869: 13; quoting Schelling SW I.5, 298; 1966: 94)

Liddon’s argument rested in part on Mansel’s earlier series of Bampton lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought given in 1858, a key moment in the development of British agnostic thought, and which will be discussed in Chapter 8. The point though was a favourite touchstone of Liddon’s, and he returned to the same problem from the same pulpit, on Christmas Eve 1871: ‘God is Incarnate’, says Schelling, ‘in the race of mankind; nothing less than humanity at large is the true tabernacle of the Eternal; and Christians are mistaken, not in their conception of an Incarnation of God, but in the restriction which they impose on it.’ Here, as so often, Pantheism shows itself incapable of appreciating that jealous anxiety to guard the moral character of God, which is characteristic of the Christian Creed. (1891: 149)

This significance of Liddon’s critique lies in the ways in which, after Mansel and the ensuing controversies his lectures precipitated with both

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philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and theologians such as Maurice, the question of the incarnation became central to the late nineteenth century response to Schelling’s pantheism.11 Of the later nineteenth-century theological figures to engage seriously with Schelling, only Charles Upton (1831–1920) did so in a manner particularly sympathetic. The Unitarian minister was a student of Martineau, whose writings he helped to popularise, and in the preface to his Hibbert Lectures of 1893, Upton acknowledged the influence of not only Martineau, but also the British idealist tradition of Green and ‘the gifted Caird brothers’ (1894: ix). Upton’s central thesis in these lectures was a defence of the doctrine of freedom, considered with reference to the problem of evil, in an argument inspired by Hermann Lotze’s discussion of these themes in his Mikrokosmus (1856–1864) and Grundzüge der Religionsphilosophie (1883), both indebted to Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. Therein, Upton quoted Schelling approvingly, saying he was not ‘far from the truth when he declared, “the feeling of life wakes in man, dreams in animals, slumbers in plants, and sleeps in stones”’ (1894: 185).12 But, with the odd exception of figures such as Upton, the problems for Schelling’s British theological reception, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, are probably best emblematised by his characterisation in the pages of two influential works written by Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908), the German liberal Protestant theologian. In his Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlichen Grundlage [The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of its History] (1878), translated into English in 1886, Pfleiderer sought to accommodate Schelling’s contributions to theology as a moment within a wider historical narrative alongside Kant, Herder and Schleiermacher. The popularity of this work, and his successful 1885 Hibbert lectures, led to the commissioning of a book on a similar topic written expressly for the British market: his The Development of Theology Since Kant, and Its Progress in Great Britain Since 1825 (1890). In it, Pfleiderer devotes several pages to a detailed exposition of Schelling’s early philosophy and its implications to nineteenth century theological thought. Noting in his concluding paragraph that Schelling’s ‘theosophy contains profound ideas, which have influenced theological and philosophical thinkers’, Pfleiderer deems them undermined by the author’s tendency towards ‘mythological poetry’. Even when being introduced by a fellow countryman in the final decade of the century, Schelling was unable to escape the association with the worst of Romanticism. Pfleiderer

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final sentence adds salt to the wound, dismissing the Philosophie der Offenbarung which, having been ‘only published after Schelling’s death, […] has had no influence upon the development of theology’ (1890: 67). As we have seen throughout this chapter, comments such as those of Pfleiderer were both wrong and right: wrong, insofar as figures such as Hare were indeed responding to the positive philosophy in their theology, but right insofar as such ideas remained marginal to the central developments of British theological discourse, which continued to attack an image of Schelling epitomised by a pantheistic interpretation of his Naturphilosophie. For an entire generation of Victorians, the name of Schelling had been tainted as atheistic. Emblematic of this pose was the fleeting allusion to the name of Schelling in that quintessential novel of nineteenth-century religious doubt, Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920), daughter of Tom Arnold, granddaughter of Thomas and niece of Matthew, summed up the problem of agnosticism in this best-selling late Victorian novel, about an Oxford clergyman who begins to doubt Anglicanism after coming across Strauss and Schelling (1987: 195). In this sense, Schelling’s most long lasting influence to British theology perhaps came less in the theological debates of the later nineteenth century, but rather through Mansel’s detailed engagement with Hamilton in his Bampton Lectures, and the controversy this precipitated. It was this dispute, discussed in Chapter 8, which precipitated a new, and specifically British theological position: agnosticism. If Schelling’s earlier British readers had fought earnestly over the theological import of Schelling, whether the early or the late, the debate shifted in the late 1850s, and Schelling’s name began to be a rallying cry for a new generation of thinkers, battling over precisely where ‘The Limits of Religious Thought’ could be drawn.

Notes

1. On Coleridge and Unitarianism, see Piper (1990) and Ulmer (2005). 2.  My reading of these passages is indebted to that by Harding (1985: 60–73). 3.  Compare the roughly contemporaneous fragment ‘On the Error of Schelling’s Philosophy’ (1995: 786–787), seemingly summarising Coleridge’s reading of the Einleitung with Green. 4.  On Schelling’s anticipation of process theology, see Thomas (1985: 70–71).

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5. ‘On the Trinity’ was previously dated by Henry Nelson Coleridge to 1830 and published in Literary Remains (1838) in expurgated form under the title of ‘Formula Fidei de Sanctissima Trinitate’. 6. Given the dates, one possibility is that this was the ‘manuscript sheet of his “Mythological Lectures”’ of 1837 which Schelling had given to Bunsen when they had discussed Bunsen’s Ægyptiaca in Munich in the summer of 1838. See Bunsen (1867: 310). 7. In a letter to William Whewell dated 29 September 1828, Rose complained that Pusey’s attack was plagiarised from Johann Matthias Schröckh (1733–1808) (Trinity/Add.Ms.c/211/140). See also Rose’s earlier and later letters to Whewell of 11 May and 7 October 1828, describing his perturbation over Pusey’s attack, and his report of confronting Pusey over the allegations of plagiarism, respectively (Trinity/ Add.Ms.c/211/139, 211/141). 8. See William Whewell to Julius Charles Hare, 17 February 1832. Trinity Add.Ms.a/215/27. 9. Presumably Cairns is referring to the first two volumes of I. A. Fichte’s Grundzüge zum Systeme der Philosophie (1833–1836). 10. Gladstone notes Schelling’s name on the flyleaf of his copy of Joseph Goodsir’s (1815–1893) Seven Homilies on Ethnic Inspiration, read in 1871; Schleiermacher’s response to Schelling and Goethe in his edition of his Life (1860: 1: 294–295), which he read in the autumn of 1873; and Joseph Gostwich (1814–1887) and Robert Harrison’s (1820– 1897) introduction to Schelling’s influence in their Outlines of German Literature (1873: 378–379). Gladstone’s marginalia in copies of works he owned now kept at St. Deniol’s Hawarden has been transcribed, and can be accessed digitally at http://gladcat.cirqahosting.com/. 11. The problem of Schelling on the Incarnation was a topic to which Liddon also referred in his 1865 lecture at St. Mary’s, Oxford, his 1870 Lent lectures at St. James’ Church, Piccadilly (1866: 114–115; 1872: 16, 62), and his lecture at St. Paul’s on Christmas Day, 1881 (1891: 79). 12. Where Upton got the phrase from is uncertain: it had recently appeared in English in the 1888 translation of Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, and in Plumptre’s chapter on Schelling in her General Sketch (1878: 2: 204), although there treated negatively. The first use of the line in English seems to have been by William Lecky (1838–1903) in his History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1866 [1865]: 1: 374).

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Works Cited Alford, Henry. 1866. The New Testament for English Readers, 2 vols. London: Rivingtons. Anon. 1839. Specimens of Foreign Literature. The Christian Teacher [n.s.] 1: 183–185. Brande, William Thomas (ed.). 1842. Dictionary of Science, Literature and Art. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Bunsen, Christian Charles Josias. 1867. Egypt’s Place in Universal History: Vol. IV. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Bunsen, Frances Waddington. 1868. A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1959. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume IV, 1815–1819, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1973. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 3, 1808–1819, ed. Kaleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1984. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1990. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 4, 1819–1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christiansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. Marginalia IV. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 12, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 5, 1827–1834, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davidson, Samuel. 1843. Sacred Hermeneutics Developed and Applied. Edinburgh: Thomas Clark. ———. 1899. The Autobiography and Diary of Samuel Davidson, ed. Ann Jane Davidson. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Erskine, Thomas. 1884. Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ed. William Hanna. Edinburgh: David Douglas. Fairbairn, A.M. 1879. Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History. London: Williams & Norgate. Ferrier, James Frederick. 1840. The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge. Blackwood’s Magazine 47: 287–299. Gladstone. W.E. 1968. The Gladstone Diaries: Volume II, 1838–1839, ed. M.R.D. Foot. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Goodsir, Joseph Taylor. 1871. Seven Homilies on Ethnic Inspiration. London: Williams & Norgate. Gostwick, Joseph, and Robert Harrison. 1873. Outlines of German Literature. London: Williams and Norgate. Harding, Anthony John. 1985. Coleridge and the Inspired Word. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Hare, Julius. 1846. The Mission of the Comforter, 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. Horrocks, Don. 2004. Laws of the Spiritual Order: Innovation and Reconstruction in the Soteriology of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Kingsley, Charles. 1854. Alexandria and Her Schools. London: Macmillan. Lecky, William. 1866. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 2 vols., 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Liddon, Henry Parry. 1866. Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford. London: Rivingtons. ———. 1869. The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. London: Rivingtons. ———. 1872. Some Elements of Religion. London: Rivingtons. ———. 1891. Christmastide in St. Paul’s, 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green & Co. ———. 1893. Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 5 vols. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Lockhart, J.G. 1838. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 7 vols. Edinburgh: Robert Cardell. MacEwan, Alexander R. 1895. Life and Letters of John Cairns. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Martineau, James. 1869. Essays Philosophical and Theological, 2 vols. London: Trübner. ———. 1882. A Study of Spinoza. London: Macmillan. ———. 1888. A Study of Religion: Its Sources and Contents, 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Maurice, F.D. 1853. Theological Essays, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. ———. 1862. Modern Philosophy. London: Griffin, Bohn and Company. Mill, William Hodge. 1840. Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the Gospel. Cambridge: J. & J.J. Deighton. Newman, John Henry. 1838. Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 2nd ed. London: J.G. & F. Rivington. ———. 1845. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: James Toovey. ———. 1969. The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, ed. Edward Sillem, 2 vols. Louvain: Nauwelaerts.

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Palmer, William. 1849. An Appeal to the Scottish Bishops and Clergy. Edinburgh: Alex Laurie & Co. ———. 1882. Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church in the Years 1840, 1841, ed. F.H. Newman. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Pattison, Mark. 1861. Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688– 1750. In Essays and Reviews, ed. Frederick Temple, et al., 7th ed., 254–329. London: Longmans. ———. 1885. Memoirs. London: Macmillan. Pfleiderer, Otto. 1886. The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of Its History, trans. Alexander Stewart and Allan Menzies, 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate. ———. 1890. The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant, trans. J. Frederick Smith. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Piper, H.W. 1990. Coleridge and the Unitarian Consensus. The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure. London: Macmillan. Plumptre, Constance. 1878. General Sketch of the History of Pantheism, 2 vols. London: Trübner. Pusey, Edward. 1828. An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany. London: C. & J. Rivington. ———. 1838. Patience and Confidence, the Strength of the Church, 2nd ed. Oxford: J.H. Parker. ———. 1872. Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford. London: James Parker. ———. 1879. Prophecy of Jesus. Oxford: James Parker. ———. 1898. Spiritual Letters of Edward Bouverie Pusey, ed. J.O. Johnson and W.C.E. Newbolt. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Railton, Nicholas. 1999. No North Sea: The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: Brill. Rigg, James Harrison. 1859. Modern Anglican Theology. London: Alexander Heylin. ———. 1866. Essays for the Times. London: Elliot Stock. Rio, Alexis-François. 1872. Epilogue à l’art chrétien, 2 vols. Paris: Hachette. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London: Macmillan. R. [Hugh James Rose?] 1833. Schelling’s Lectures on Christianity. British Magazine 3 (May): 521–522. Rose, Hugh James. 1825. The State of the Protestant Religion in Germany. Cambridge: J. Deighton & Sons. Schelling, F.W.J. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart.

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———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1860. Life, as Unfolded in His Autobiography and Letters, trans. F. Rowan, 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Sterling, John. 1848. Essays and Tales, ed. Julius Hare, 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. Taylor, John James. 1845. Religious Life of England. London: John Chapman. ———. 1872. Letters Embracing His Life, ed. John Hamilton Thom, 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate. Thomas, J. Heywood. 1985. Fichte and Schelling. In Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West: Volume I, ed. Ninian Smart, et al., 41–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Twesten, August Detlev Christian. 1826. Vorlesungen über die Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 2 vols. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes. Ulmer, William A. 2005. Virtue of Necessity: Coleridge’s Unitarian Moral Theory. Modern Philology 102 (3): 372–404. Upton, Charles. 1894. Lectures on the Bases of Religious Belief. London: Williams and Norgate. Ward, Mrs. Humphrey. 1987. Robert Elsmere, ed. Rosemary Ashton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilberforce, Samuel. 1838. The Power of God’s Word Needful for National Education. Portsea: W. Woodward. Wilson, Jessie Aitken. 1862. Memoir of George Wilson. London: Macmillan and Co. Wright, Thomas. 1830. The True Plan of a Living Temple, 3 vols. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.

CHAPTER 8

The Legacies of Naturphilosophie and British Science

The central role that science played in Schelling’s early philosophy cannot be underestimated. In science, Schelling saw a set of theories which he felt helped explain the underlying philosophy of nature. In his Einleitung (1799), he speaks of his system as a step towards the ‘theory that the magnetic, electric, chemical, and, finally, even the organic phenomena, are interwoven into one great interdependent whole’ (SW I.3, 319; HKA I.8, 84; 2004: 227). The following year, in January 1800, Schelling founded the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, in which he would publish his Darstellung, and which would feature important work from other figures of Naturphilosophie such as Henrik Steffens (1773–1845). A few years later in the Methode (1803), Schelling made a strong case for the inclusion of the natural sciences in a modern reformed university syllabus. And while the role played by science in Schelling’s philosophy gradually began to wane as his system shifted, first into identity philosophy and then into positive philosophy, he never gave it up entirely, giving a lecture on 28 March 1832 Über Faraday’s neueste Entdeckung [On Faraday’s Latest Discovery] to the Bavarian Academy of Science. The significance of Schelling’s contribution to nineteenth-century science has been debated. On the one hand, Naturphilosophie seems like something of an aberration which let some of the most speculative impulses loose on supposedly empirical facts. Indeed, there is certainly something philosophically excessive about both Schelling’s interpretation of science and the interpretation of those Naturphilosphen who followed © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_8

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in his footsteps, such as Oken. Likewise, it would be easy to minimise the significance played by Schelling in the development of British science in the early years of the nineteenth century, particularly given the ways in which British science had been traditionally carried out during the eighteenth century in empirical and mechanical terms, and the ways in which it would develop in the later nineteenth century. This chapter seeks to evaluate the ways in which the reception of Schelling, both positive and negative, helped shape the history of British science during the nineteenth century. It begins with the ways in which Schelling was influenced by British science and then looks at the ways in which Naturphilosophie was read by Coleridge and his circle, including the chemist Humphry Davy, and through him, Michael Faraday (1791–1867), whose ideas were seized upon by Schelling himself as a kind of mutual confirmation. It also considers the influence of Schelling on the development of nineteenth-century British biology, first through Coleridge’s close friend Joseph Henry Green, and then through Green’s student, Richard Owen, whose ideas vied for acceptance with those of Charles Darwin during the middle years of the century. The chapter concludes by considering the development of agnosticism in the later nineteenth century, a philosophical position which linked the discourses of science and religion, and which was itself intimately tied to the history of Schelling’s British reception, originating in an engagement with Hamilton’s ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’. As has been the case throughout this study, there are major methodological issues in attempting to reconstruct such a history, including the question of transmission: just how much Schelling had figures such as Davy read? Likewise, if Owen responded to later developments in Naturphilosophie in the work of writers such as Oken or Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), just how far can we say that his work was informed by Schelling? But perhaps such questions are somewhat moot. As Kenneth L. Caneva has argued, it is not always advisable ‘to get too involved in the subtleties of Schelling’s metaphysics of nature and knowledge’ when attempting to evaluate his influence on nineteenth century scientists. Rather ‘what one needs in order to get a handle on the question of influence is a grasp of the relatively small set of concepts that characterize work in a naturphilosophisch mode’ (1997: 40). These central concepts include the idea of a dynamischer Proceß, of Polarität and of Indifferenz. As the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has argued, it is through establishing this kind of intellectual lexicon in

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the discourse of early nineteenth-century science that Naturphilosophie may be argued to have ‘provided an appropriate philosophical background’ for a series of major scientific discoveries which were made later in the nineteenth century, such as the discovery of the principle of energy conservation (1977: 99).

Romanticism and Naturphilosophie It has become a commonplace in writing the history of Naturphilosophie to remark that this approach to the natural world begins in part with Kant. As Pearce Williams has argued, Kant’s ‘system of dynamic physics provided the framework within which forces, not fluids, could be viewed as the active principles of matter’ (1965: 59). In his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft [Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science] (1781), Kant had argued that the forces of nature could be reduced to the principles of ‘attraction and repulsion’ (II P5–6; GS 4: 508–512; 2002a: 219–222). According to Williams, Kant’s reduction paved the way for a theory of ‘the unity of all forces’, their essential convertibility. It was ‘this fundamental insight [that] was to serve as the stimulus for two generations of scientists amongst whom may be numbered Ritter, Davy, Oersted, and Michael Faraday’ (1965: 62). But while it is true that Schelling exploited some of the implications he saw underwriting Kant’s comments, it is worth noting from the outset the extent to which his own Naturphilosophie owed much to British sources, and particularly an important Scottish interlocutor, John Brown. Brown had published his Elementa Medicinae in Latin in 1780, a work which was translated into English in 1788, and in which he argued that all organisms possess the quality of ‘excitability’ (1795: 1: 89). The Elementa was translated into German in 1795 by Melchior Adam Weikard (1742–1803) and became important when Karl August Eschenmayer proposed bringing together natural science and philosophy in a Natur-Metaphysik (1797), one which relied on Brown’s concept of stimulation. By the time that the young Coleridge arrived in Germany to study at Göttingen two years later, Brown’s ideas were becoming fashionable in contemporary German scientific circles, as evidenced in a number of Coleridge’s entries in his notebooks dating from the period (1957: ##388–389).1 Schelling himself perhaps first encountered Brown’s ideas through reading Andreas Röschlaub’s (1768–1835) Untersuchungen über Pathologie (1798), and in the summer of 1800

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he travelled to Bamberg to study in Röschlaub’s clinic. It has even been suggested that Schelling’s attempts to apply Brown’s theories may have led to the death of one his patients, Auguste Böhmer (1785–1800), daughter of Caroline (Neubauer 1967: 372–373).2 What is certain, however, is that Schelling knew of Brown the year that Röschlaub’s work was published, because his ideas proved central to his Naturphilosophie in both Von der Weltseele (1798) and the Erster Entwurf (1799), in which the whole third division leads from a discussion of ‘the Concept of Excitability’ to ‘the Theatre of the Dynamic Organization of the Universe’ (105–140, 187–192). Brown is also discussed as an authority in the Methode (136, 140). In this sense, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie originally developed in part out of an engagement with British science. It is not unimportant in our current context to note that a revised edition of Brown’s Elementa was translated into English by Thomas Beddoes in 1803. A physician and writer on science, Beddoes was a close friend of Coleridge and one of the founders of the Bristol Institute. From 1795, Coleridge and Beddoes saw a great deal of each other, and Beddoes also knew German. He had published early important articles on Kant and German literature in the Monthly Review and was associated with John Aikin’s Monthly Magazine, which, as we have already seen, was an important conduit for the British reception of German philosophy in general and Schelling in particular. Coleridge’s serious interest in science dates to around the time he first met Beddoes. In a letter to Thomas Poole dated 5 May 1796, Coleridge writes of his immediate aims: to learn German, to travel to ‘Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides’, and there to ‘study Chemistry & Anatomy [and] bring over with me [the works] of Kant, the great german [sic.] Metaphysician’ (1956: 209). Just under a year later, writing to Joseph Cottle (1770–1853) in early 1797, Coleridge remarks that in order to prepare himself to write an epic poem, he needed to be versed in both science and literature: I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the minds of man—then the minds of men—in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. (1956: 320–321)

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As we have seen, Coleridge did indeed spend time in Jena, where Schelling had made his name, but he would also study in Göttingen, a university which, as early as 1793, had been noted by Beddoes as a place where Kant’s thought was beginning to become influential (1793: 89–90), so that it seems likely under his influence that Coleridge decided to make this additional trip (Levere 1977: 353–354). At Göttingen, he would study with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose ‘vital materialism’ developed out of his own engagement with Kant (Lenoir 1980: 77–108), attending ‘lectures on Physiology, Anatomy, & Natural History with regularity’ (1956: 518), and it was likely on the same trip that Coleridge met Steffens, one of Schelling’s most important early followers who developed the insights of Naturphilosophie into the field of geology (Levere 1977: 354). Beddoes had employed the young Humphry Davy at the Pneumatic Institution in 1798 and from there he met Coleridge sometime in October 1799, the two becoming friends. Coleridge participated in Davy’s experiments in Bristol and he would negotiate to secure the publication of Davy’s Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800), discussing his friend with William Godwin (1756–1836) in London (1956: 557). When Davy was invited to lecture at the Royal Institute in January 1802, Coleridge travelled down to the capital to sit in the audience (Coburn 1974: 81; Levere 1977: 355). In The Friend (1812), Coleridge makes a striking parallel between Davy and Shakespeare that explains in part his fascination with Naturphilosophie: ‘if in SHAKESPEARE we find nature idealized into poetry, through the creative power of a profound yet observant meditation, so thoroughly the meditative observation of a DAVY, […] we find poetry […] substantiated and realized in nature’ (1969: 470–471). For Coleridge, poetry may be realized in nature, in a motif which also fascinated Schelling himself. Around the same date as The Friend was published, however, Coleridge began to sense a distance between his own Naturphilosophie and Davy’s chemistry, which was becoming more atomistic and less ‘dynamic’. He discovered that Steffens had made predictions which Davy had proven in his experiments, a point which Coleridge latched on to the detriment of his former friend. In a letter to Charles Aders of December 1820, he writes of himself as being ‘most indignant at the continued plagiarisms of Sir H. Davy from the Discoveries of Steffens and others’ (1971: 130). But he was not opposed to continuing to trade in part on the association, as shown in a letter to

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Dr. Williamson dating to as late as November 1823, in which Coleridge praised Davy as ‘the Father and Founder of philosophical Alchemy, the man who born a Poet first converted Poetry into Science and realized what few men possessed Genius enough to fancy’ (1971: 309). Regardless, however, of this gradual cooling off, the friendship between Coleridge and Davy during these years was strong and a significant factor in his intellectual development. While the direct influence of Schelling on Coleridge is beyond dispute, it is far more difficult to evaluate the extent to which Davy or Faraday were directly influenced by Schelling. Williams argues forcibly for a direct lineage derived through Coleridge, suggesting that since Coleridge and Davy ‘were close friends in the early 1800’s […] it seems likely, indeed inevitable, that he and Davy discussed Naturphilosophie in some detail’ (1971: 530). But this claim is by no means as ‘inevitable’ as Williams’ makes out, as Trevor Levere argues (1968, 1977, 1981). As a young man at home ‘in metaphysical enquiries as well as the pursuits of science’ (1836: 1: 25), the evidence from Davy’s early life suggests that he might have been predisposed to appreciate Schelling, but a willing temperament does not establish influence. While his brother recalls him reading Kant in 1786 (1836: 1: 36), Davy seems to have little understood the contours of post-Kantian German philosophy. Writing in a manuscript dating to around 1808, Davy puts Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s (1776–1810) ‘errors as a theorist’ down to ‘his indulgence in the peculiar literary taste of his country where the metaphysical dogmas of Kant which as far as I can learn are pseudo Platonism are preferred’ (1968: 96). The passage perhaps suggests that Davy had not in fact read Kant, but it certainly suggests a limited engagement with Schelling, given the extent to which Ritter’s work followed in the latter’s footsteps. As Levere notes, it may also be significant that the Royal Institution’s library bought no significant works of German metaphysics while Davy worked there (Levere 1968: 97). What is clear, however, is that Schelling himself was quick to see the ways in which Davy’s scientific discoveries might further his philosophical cause. As Michael Friedman has argued (2013: 76–77), Schelling’s vision of the unity of forces and the organicism of nature was fuelled by Alessandro Volta’s (1745–1827) invention of the voltaic pile in 1800 and a series of related discoveries. Some of these insights can be more clearly linked to the naturphilosphische than others: it was more or less directly under the inspiration of Schelling that Ritter developed the field of

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electrochemistry, and it was through combining the discoveries of Davy and Ritter that Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the principle of electromagnetism in 1820. But Schelling himself was certainly aware of Davy. As Martin Wallen has shown, Schelling found in Davy’s ‘accounts of electromagnetic fluid (1804-12) […] the animating force [for his philosophy] that did not devalue physical being in favor of an unchanging essence’ (2005: 122), one which became central to his attempt to think the ground of being in the beginnings of his positive philosophy. Indeed, Schelling clearly alludes to Davy’s experiments as being ‘wellknown but insufficiently regarded’ in the third version of the Weltalter (SW I.8, 282; 2000: 61). What is also clear is that Coleridge saw Davy’s work in the context of Schelling’s. In a marginal note to Schelling’s Darlegung, dating to around 1815, in which Schelling notes that physics had been ‘able to give a scientific account of the course of events of a chemical process only when it recognised that what really exists in a chemical phenomenon is not matter […] but the living bond or the copula of the two electricities’ (SW I.7, 100), Coleridge remarks: ‘So I hoped […] it would have been when Sir H. Davy adopted my suggestion that all Composition consisted in the Balance of Opposing Energies’ (1998: 358–359). Likewise, in a marginal note to his copy of the Ideen, likely made around 1818 while Coleridge was intensively working on Naturphilosophie with Green, he credits Davy with developing Schelling’s thought in important ways (1998: 392). The first of the passages in particular is important for any claim regarding the influence of Schelling on Davy: if we take Coleridge at face value, he takes credit here as the original inspiration for one of Davy’s most important insights, and makes clear that he associates this insight first and foremost with Schelling. Even if Coleridge may be seeking to take too much of the credit, the passage shows clearly the ways in which Davy’s insights could be easily understood within the context of Naturphilosophie. Coleridge’s own contribution to Naturphilosophie was developed in particular in his Theory of Life, written between late 1816 and 1818. At this time, Coleridge’s personal knowledge of the subject was limited to the works of Schelling and Steffens, but in later drafts he also drew on Carus and Oken.3 Like the Naturphilosophen, Coleridge’s theory of life, which sought to connect physics and physiology with a theory of force as the organising principle of all existence, rested on the principle of polarity. Writing to Charles Augustus Tulk (1786–1849), the Swedenborgian, in September 1817 Coleridge states that ‘in my literary Life, you will

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find a sketch of the subjective pole of the Dynamic Philosophy’ (1959: 767). He saw a link between the principles of ‘Attraction, Repulsion, and Galvanism’ and the principles of ‘Sensibility, Irritability, and Reproduction’, showing the clear influence of Schelling (1959: 769). For Coleridge, ‘a Life, a Power, an Inside, must have pre-existed, of which length and Breadth are the process, the fluxions; and of which the Substance, the LIFE appearing, are the results (1959: 775). In a letter of the following January, Coleridge continued their correspondence: The two great Laws (causa effectivae) of Nature would be Identity – or the Law of the Ground; and Identity in the difference of Polarity = the Manifestation of unity by opposites. – The two great Ends (& inclusively, the processes) of Nature would be – Individualization, or apparent detachment from Nature = progressive Organization and Spirit, or the re-union with nature as the apex of Individualization – the birth of the Soul, the Ego or conscious Self, into the Spirit.

According to the second Law of Polarity, ‘all opposites, produced as Poles, must themselves be Polar’ (1959: 807). This principle of Polarity, and of Life as the gradual progressive unfolding of Being, shows that, in its basic principles, Coleridge’s theory of life was Schellingean. The point is confirmed by looking at the language used to express this philosophy of Polarität in Coleridge’s notebooks during the period. In an entry dating to January 1817, he argues ‘that Life can manifest itself only by Poles, itself being the Equator, under the two forms of Indifference and Identity’ (1973: #4333). And in his Theory of Life, written in the same period, he puts it as follows. There is an ‘unceasing polarity of life, as the form of its process, and its tendency to progressive individuation as the law of its direction’ (1995: 533). It is this principle of polarity than manifests all life as such: That nothing real does or can exist corresponding to either pole exclusively, is involved in the very definition of a THING as the synthesis of opposing energies. That a Thing is, is owing to the co-inherence therein of any two powers; but that it is that particular thing arises from the proportions in which these are co-present. (1995: 535)

Coleridge’s engagement with Schelling as a philosopher of science to be reckoned with was significant, but others in the British scientific community were also becoming aware of the value of Naturphilosophie. We

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have already seen in Chapter 2 that British medical periodicals were early to mention Schelling’s name in print. In 1816, the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal carried a review of ‘the new German philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie)’. While the anonymous author cannot help but dig at ‘the excrescences of this new doctrine; the mystical obscurity […]; the extravagant, and therefore absurd, desire of instituting comparisons between things perfectly dissimilar, […] and especially the barbarous language, full of foreign, unintelligible expressions’, they nevertheless conclude that Naturphilosophie had ‘conferred permanent benefit even upon the theory of medicine’ (1816: 395), citing the early work of Schelling and Oken’s Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (1809– 1811) as key texts for the British reader to acquaint themselves with (1816: 396). Perhaps the author of this paper was the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox (1793–1862), who published a number of his pieces in the same journal, and who was a pupil of John Abernethy (1764–1831) at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. Certainly, Knox was acquainted with German Naturphilosophie by 1823 (Rehbock 1983: 208 n.), and he himself claimed that, as early as 1820–1821, he had come to recognise that ‘the element of mind to which the German owes his vast reputation as the most philosophical of all men; […] which produced Kant, and Goethe […] and Oken, Carus and [Johann Baptist von] Spix [17811826], […] is not, cannot be Saxon’ (1850: 230). But if Coleridge was not alone in his appreciation of the importance of German philosophy to the present state and future progress of science, it is important to recognise at the same time the ways in which he differed from the Naturphilosophen in explaining this principle of polarity. For Coleridge, as we saw in the previous chapter, Schelling’s philosophy seemed to necessitate pantheistic conclusions, and seeking to avoid this gambit, he argued that the universe was the product of an initial divine act of will. This is a point he made to Tulk in November 1818: Schelling is the Head and Founder of a philosophic Sect, entitled Naturphilosophen, or Philosophers of Nature. He is beyond doubt a man of Genius, and by the revival and more extensive application of the Law of Polarity (i.e. that every Power manifests itself by opposite Forces) and by the reduction of all Phaenomena to the three forms of Magnetism, Electricity, and constructive Galvanism, or the Powers of Length, Breadth, and Depth, his system is extremely plausible and alluring at a first acquaintance […], [with] a permanent value. But as a System, […] it is reduced at

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last to a mere Pantheism […] of which the Deity itself is but an Out-birth. (1959: 883)

The same idea is also recorded in a notebook entry dating to August 1818, in which the principle of Polarität is explicitly conceived of as a result of ‘the Absoluteness of the divine Acts’ (1973: #4418). And it is worth noting that a similar stumbling block would likely have prevented Faraday from any real sympathy with Schelling. While Williams argues that Faraday must have known Schelling through the mediating influence of Davy and Coleridge, in point of fact, the case for his direct engagement with Schelling is even less convincing than it is for Davy’s: there is no evidence in his journals or diaries of any engagement with German philosophy at all (Levere 1968: 100), and Faraday would later pronounce himself critical of Ørsted, writing in a review article that ‘I have very little to say on M. Oersted’s theory, for I must confess I do not quite understand it’ (1822: 107). Davy too would have found issue with Schelling on similar ground, as an unpublished early draft on ‘Theology’ demonstrates (Davy 1836: 1: 27–28).

Archetypes: Schelling and Evolutionary Theory Crabb Robinson recalls that during his lectures on aesthetics at Jena, Schelling dismissed Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) as an example of the ‘bestialities’ that Locke’s empiricism produced (Morley 1929: 116; 1869: 1: 128), and in private Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791) was ‘the favorite Theme of Ridicule’ (Morley 1929: 199). Crabb Robinson, however saw more kinship between Schelling and ‘the famous Theory of Generation, called Evolution Theory’ (2010: 128), quoting Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), in which ‘All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body Nature is and God the Soul’ (I.267– 268; quoted Robinson 2010: 127). With respect to Darwin, Coleridge was less abusive that Schelling had been, but similarly cautious, but through the introduction of Beddoes, Coleridge and Davy met the then seventy-year old in Derby in 1796 (Coleridge 1956: 177).4 But while nineteenth-century evolutionary theory has come to be defined for us by the name of Erasmus’ grandson, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was simply one of many theories competing for attention and acceptance of the scientific community during the period. Indeed, it was another figure, Richard Owen, today remembered for coining the word ‘dinosaur’,

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who dominated the debates over evolutionary biology during the middle years of the century, and his theory of the archetype developed in part out of his engagement with Naturphilosophie. When the young Owen joined the staff of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1827, the position of Hunterian lecturer was held by Joseph Henry Green. Green had travelled to Germany in 1806 at the age of fifteen to be educated, returning in 1809 to be apprenticed to his uncle, Henry Cline (1750–1827), surgeon at the College. Another Romantic figure immersed in German literature and culture, Green had met Coleridge at his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at a party to honour the German poet Ludwig Tieck, an event which Coleridge recalls in a letter to Thomas Boosey in which he also discusses Schelling (Coleridge 1959: 738).5 The two became close, and discussed German philosophy, with Coleridge writing that ‘my own opinion of the German Philosophers does not greatly differ from your’s [sic.]’, and that, if ‘Schelling is too ambitious, too eager to be the Grand Seignior of the allein seligmachende Philosophie, to be altogether a trust-worthy Philosopher’, he ranked nevertheless as ‘a man of great Genius’ (1959: 791, 792).6 Tieck arranged for Green to travel that same year to Berlin, writing to his friend, the philosopher Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819), that Green was keen to ‘be instructed by Schelling, whom he knows and reveres best, and particularly to be able to learn about the history of the new philosophy’ (1973: 370–371). Green owned Kant’s multi-volume Vermischte Schriften and Schelling’s Einleitung, both of which he lent to Coleridge who annotated the copies (Coleridge 1959: 873), but in the end, he studied with Solger himself rather than Schelling, returning to England in 1820 upon the death of his uncle to take up the Surgeonship of St. Thomas Hospital. He was appointed to the Hunterian lectureship in 1823, and made Professor at the Royal Academy of Art in 1825, before being made Coleridge’s literary executor upon his death in 1834, carrying on and developing his friend’s legacy in his Spiritual Philosophy (1865). It was Green’s friend, Gioacchino Prati (1790–1863), the exiled Italian revolutionary, who would later contribute a medical column to the Penny Satirist from 1837 to 1840, in which he recalled his own studies with Schelling in 1816 in his autobiography (1837: 1). Owen encountered Green firstly in his capacity as Hunterian lecturer. Founded in honour of the Scottish surgeon John Hunter (1728– 1793), the Company of Surgeons had acquired his collection of medical curiosities upon his death, and they commissioned annual lectures in

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comparative anatomy, physiology and surgery. In 1814, Abernethy lectured on An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life, and it was in response to this lecture and the controversy it precipitated in the next few years with William Lawrence (1783–1867), that Coleridge himself penned his own Theory of Life, sympathetic to Abernethy. Schelling himself was also aware of Hunter, to whom he alludes twice in the Erster Entwurf (SW I.3, 133, 170; HKA I.7, 163, 189; 2004: 98, 124). When Green, some years later, was appointed to give the lecture on comparative anatomy, it is significant that he relied heavily on Carus’ Lehrbuch der Zootomie (1818). But the lectures also show Green’s nuanced appreciation of Kant’s later work and the philosophy of transcendental morphology which became so appealing to the Naturphilosophen.7 His lectures rested upon distinguishing between the descriptive, historical and physiological approaches to natural science (Green in Owen 1992: 307), a point which predates Coleridge’s use of a similar structure in the Opus Maximus in March 1827. For Green, writing a year later in 1828, there is ‘in all nature’s acts, a growth, and the symmetry, proportion and plan, [that] arise[s] out of an internal organizing principle’ (Green 1840: 107). This idea seems to have been partly based on Green’s reading of Schelling, and his interpretation of Kant on ‘physiography’ is inflected by Schelling’s reading of Spinoza (Sloan 2007: 162). Indeed, Green makes very clear the esteem he has for Schelling. In the preface to Vital Dynamics (1840), Green quotes the German philosopher approvingly in Coleridge’s translation (xxix–xxx) and in the text itself he characterises ‘nature as labouring in birth with man, and her living products as so many significant topes of the great process, which she is ever tending to complete in the evolution of the organic realm’. In a footnote, Green points out the correspondence of the argument to that of Schelling, ‘whose speculations produced a revolution in the minds of his countrymen’, having ‘an invigorating influence on the progress of natural science’, quoting from the Methode (Green 1840: 38 & n.; quoting SW I.5, 342–343; 1966: 141–142). The surviving documents from the 1824–1828 Hunterian orations only give hints as to the actual substance of the lectures themselves, although Owen recalled that Green’s argument appealed to the idea of ‘the underlying Unity, as it had been advocated and illustrated by Oken and Carus’ (Green 1865: 1: xiv). But the influence of Green on Owen

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seems to have been significant, and he attended both the 1827 and 1828 sessions. It was Green who first introduced the theory of the ‘archetype’ to British biology, an idea which would later become the cornerstone of Owen’s own philosophy. Green defines the ‘archetype’ as a causative principle, combining both power and intelligence, containing, predetermining, and producing its actual result in all its manifold relations, in reference to a final purpose; and realized in a whole of parts, in which the Idea, as the constitutive energy, is evolved and set forth in its unity, totality, finality, and permanent efficiency. (Green 1840: xxv)

It was Owen, however, who would popularise the concept in his ‘Report on the Archetype’ (1847). Borrowing from Carus’s Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen- und Schalengerüstes (1828), Owen also developed the idea of ‘homology’ (Rupke 2009: 121), his translation of the German ‘Bedeutung’. In On the Nature of Limbs (1849), Owen bemoaned the imprecision of English as a scientific language in comparison with German: A German anatomist, addressing an audience of his countrymen, would feel none of the difficulty which I experienced. His language, rich in the precise expressions of philosophic abstractions, would instantly supply him with the word for the idea he meant to convey; and that word would be ‘Bedeutung’. It is the ‘Bedeutung’ of the limbs which is my present subject; and the literal translation of the word is ‘signification’. (1849: 1)

Moreover, as Robert J. Richards has recently pointed out (2013: 118– 122), irrespective of whether he had actually read Schelling or not, it was his dynamic philosophy that seemingly lay behind Owen’s idea of the archetype, the ‘organising principle, vital property or force, which produces the diversity of form’ (Owen 1847: 339). Regardless, what we can be sure of is Owen’s interest in Oken, who is cited as a ‘gifted and deep-thinking’ authority in ‘On the Archetype’ (1847: 241–242), and it was Owen who wrote the entry on ‘Oken’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1860), and who pushed for an English translation of Oken’s Lehrbuch.8 This work came out as Elements of Physiophilosophy in 1847, translated by Alfred Tulk (?–1891), the son of Charles Augustus, the Swedenborgian with whom Coleridge had corresponded in 1817 on Schelling (1959: 767–776, 883–884).

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Owen and Darwin would fall out over the former’s a­nonymous review of The Origin of Species (1859) in the Edinburgh Review (1860), in which Owen accused Darwin of intellectual short-­ sightedness and claimed, against most evidence to the contrary, that he himself had already proposed a theory of evolution. As for Darwin, we are used to thinking of his theory of evolution in non-teleological terms as distinct from the transcendental principles that guided Naturphilosophie. But as Richards has shown (2013: 105–133), two factors in Darwin’s early reading give cause to complicate that idea. When he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, Darwin had encountered Alexander von Humboldt’s Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent [Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent] (1806; English trans. 1814), and it was inspired in part by this work that Darwin took the opportunity to voyage on the H. M. S. Beagle. Humboldt’s work is a constant touchstone throughout Darwin’s Journal of Researches (1839), and in his conclusion he notes also the stylistic importance of the Voyage: As the force of impressions generally depends on preconceived ideas, I may add, that all mine were taken from the vivid descriptions in the Personal Narrative of Humboldt, which far exceed in merit any thing I have read on the subject. (1840: 604)

While Humboldt was not a Naturphilosoph himself, he would attend Schelling’s Berlin lectures 1841–1842 (Rupke 2008: 116), and his descriptions in the Voyage were framed by his reading of Goethe. It was Goethe, of course, who had developed the theory of Urpflanze in his Metamorphose der Pflanzen, an idea which had also influenced, if diffusely, Owen’s concept of the ‘archetype’. A few years later, the German poet became friends with the Wunderkind Schelling after the publication of the Erster Entwurf in 1798, and it was inspired by their meetings in Jena that the young philosopher wrote his Einleitung in 1799 which emphasised more the practical aspects of Naturphilosophie. More significant, however, for our purposes, was Darwin’s reading of William Whewell. Remembered today for coining the words ‘scientist’ and ‘physicist’, Whewell entered Cambridge in 1812, and became a Fellow of Trinity in 1817, befriending Julius Hare, Connop Thirlwall, Hugh James Rose and the geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873).9 It was together with Sedgwick that he came to meet William Wordsworth

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in the Lake District in 1821, and through Hare that Whewell met Coleridge. It was in 1832 that Whewell met Rio, recommending him to Hare as someone to meet as he is ‘an intimate friend of de Maistre and of Schelling’.10 Whewell’s German was strong, translating Goethe into English,11 and while he was slightly more circumspect with respect to Schelling than either Hare or Thirlwall were, finding himself closer to Kant, he differed from Kant insofar as he granted as possible human knowledge of something more than phenomena. Whewell was also a figure whose approach was influential on a number of other scientists during the period, such as Robert Leslie Ellis (1817–1859), the mathematician and later Fellow of Trinity. He had been introduced to Kant by H. F. C. Logan (1800–1884), a prominent Catholic divine (Verburgt 2015). It was in a letter to Logan dated 27 June 1834, that Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), the Irish physicist (not to be confused with his Scottish namesake), professed his interest in German thinking saying that he had ‘a still greater desire to study’ Schelling (Graves 1885: 2: 87). Hamilton was not the only Irish intellectual interested in Schelling: in 1836, Francis Beaufort Edgeworth (1809–1846) recommended Hamilton read Schelling’s Methode, for ‘there are some observations […] on Time and Space […] which will please you as coinciding with your own Theorems’ (Graves 1885: 2: 173).12 Likewise, Humphrey Lloyd (1800–1881), physicist and provost of Trinity College, Dublin, who travelled to Berlin in early October 1849 as president of the Royal Irish Academy, meeting Alexander von Humboldt, and whose wife, Dorothea, would regale Caroline Fox with stories of Schelling upon their return in December (1885: 2: 152). But while Whewell was closer to Kant, he agreed with Schelling in his basic philosophy of the history of science. For Whewell, the truth of science only became manifested historically, allowing the reality of ideas to become unfurled and fulfilled as time progressed. These were debts he explicitly acknowledged in his preface to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840): Although I have acknowledged Kant’s reasoning respecting the nature of Space and Time, […] my views differ greatly from his. I have also ventured to condemn some of the opinions respecting physical philosophy, published by another eminent German writer (Schelling) to whose works I have in other subjects great obligations. (1840: 1: x)

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In his earlier three-volume History of the Inductive Sciences, Schelling’s Methode is quoted by Whewell in discussing the law of diffraction (1837: 2: 357), and his oration on Faraday when contextualising Ørsted’s discovery of electromagnetic action (3: 77). It is in a similar context that Schelling is discussed in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, and where Whewell’s more critical tone gains prominence. Quoting Schelling’s Ideen, Whewell comments that ‘it was not indeed without some reason that certain of the German philosophers were accused of dealing in doctrines vast and profound in their aspect, but, in reality, indefinite, ambiguous, and inapplicable’ (1840: 1: 356). Excusing some of Schelling’s ‘fanciful and vague language’ as being mitigated by the date of his composition, Schelling is nevertheless credited with providing the intellectual context for the work of Davy, Ørsted and Faraday. Likewise, in a paper originally printed in that same year on ‘Modern German Philosophy’, Whewell shows familiarity not only with Kant and Schelling but also Fichte and Hegel (1860: 306–314), the latter of whom he is particularly dismissive of, but he characterises all three post-Kantian philosophers alike as broadly uninterested in the inductive aspects of science. But when Darwin read Whewell, he would not have encountered these kinds of measured critiques of Schelling, for it was the third volume of the History that he read, shortly after returning from the Beagle in 1838 (Richards 2013: 123). There, he would have met not only an argument broadly inspired by Schelling, but also a more specific discussion of Oken on what would shortly thereafter become known through Owen as the theory of the archetype (1837: 3: 446–448). As Richards has shown, Darwin’s thinking certainly developed over the years between his reading of Whewell and the time he published the Origin of Species in 1859, and he convincingly argues that ‘the orthodox, mechanistic interpretation of Darwin’s principle of natural selection has obscured the roots of his conception’ in a discourse with many points of contact with the philosophy of Schelling and Naturphilosophie. Darwin’s language in essays of 1842 and 1844 show that he conceived of nature ‘as if nature herself were endowed with mind’ (Richards 2013: 128). If, then, history has come to conceive of biological discourse during the nineteenth century as a narrative of Darwin’s victory, it is worth pausing to note the ways in which his supposedly anti-teleological theory of evolutionary biology was developed in a somewhat different atmosphere.

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Schelling and Agnosticism With Charles Darwin’s victory over Owen, the face of nineteenthcentury society altered forever. He gained his champions in figures such as Haeckel, his ‘bulldog’ Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) and Herbert Spencer. It was the latter’s essay on the System of Philosophy, circulated to friends in January 1860, which produced an indignant retort from John Herschel (1792–1891), famous as an early pioneer of photography: ‘I could wish you had not adopted in the very outset of your programme the Shibboleth of the Hegel and Schelling School of German Philosophy, “The Absolute”’ (Duncan 1911: 97). The association of Spencer’s thought with Schelling’s is all the more fascinating given the ways in which evolutionary biology brought in its wake a sustained new attack on doctrinal Christianity, one which would become synonymous with Huxley and Spencer towards the later years of the century. The associations of Schelling with pantheism, as we saw in the last chapter, were long-lasting sources of British frustration with the German’s philosophy. For James Harrison Rigg, ‘modern German theology’, too readily associating itself with Schelling, had forgotten the divine lesson ‘that the penetralia of being and ultimate reality are utterly inaccessible to human reason’ (1866: 354). Rigg’s language recalls Hamilton’s essay on ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’, so influential on the creation of the new Scottish school of philosophy and discussed in Chapter 3, which had married insights gleaned from Kant and Schelling with the tradition of the common sense school, exemplified in different ways in the work of writers such as Carlyle and Ferrier. But by 1866, when Rigg was writing, there was another disciple of Hamilton’s who was of perhaps even more importance for both the discourse of nineteenth-century British theology and, by extension, Victorian science: Henry Longueville Mansel. Here we trace the diffuse reception of Schelling in British thought. As we have seen, Hamilton’s idea of the unconditioned was born out of a direct engagement with Schelling, and one which played a significant role in advancing Schelling’s philosophical reputation in the 1830s. Now these same philosophical ideas began to be mobilized a quarter of a century later in the context of a debate over mid-Victorian theology, in a controversy that would, in the following years, spill over into the discourse of contemporary science. It produced results which neither Mansel, Hamilton, nor Schelling before

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them, would have envisaged, ones which led directly to the movement of British agnosticism. Appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1859, and succeeding Stanley as Regius Professor of Ecclesiastic History (1866), Mansel was later appointed Dean of St. Paul’s (1868), but it was his Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought delivered in 1858 that would cement Mansel’s place at the heart of contemporary thought. By this point, Mansel had already shown himself a keen thinker and demonstrated his great facility with German philosophy and theology; he knew the enemy, as it were, and his friend Henry William Chandler (1828–1889), his successor as Waynflete Professor in 1867, recalled his general contempt for ‘German theological work’ (Burgon 1888: 1: 222). From his earliest philosophical publications such as his Prolegomena Logica (1851), Mansel acknowledges his debts to the ‘illustrious’ Hamilton and to Kant (1851: xi), dismissing Schelling’s ‘extravagancies’ (1851: 177). Likewise, in the introduction to the third edition of his edition of Henry Aldrich’s (1647–1710) Logic (1856), he took the chance to attack Schelling, quoting the Bruno (1856: 1). When Prime Minister John Russell (1792–1878) announced a Commission to inquire into the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University and Colleges of Oxford in 1850, Mansel, who was ‘to the backbone a Conservative’ (Burgon 1888: 1: 216–217), responded in the form a satire, the Phrontisterion (1852). An imitation of Aristophanes’ Clouds, Mansel took aim at Whig politics, the extension of the university syllabus to include more focus on the natural sciences, contemporaries who were sympathetic to German thought, and specific philosophers including Schelling. When a Chorus of German Philosophers enter to sing a Strophe, they opine that they come From the land where Professors in plenty be; And we thrive and flourish, as well we may, In the land that produced one Kant with a K And many Cants with a C. (ii.78–81)

It is a land which has been ‘reared by Oken’s plastic hands’ and in which The ‘Eternal Nothing of Nature’ stands; And Theology sits on her throne of pride,

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As ‘Arithmetic personified’; And the hodmandod crawls, in its shell confined, A ‘symbol exalted of slumbering mind’. (ii.85–93)

The quotations were drawn from Tulk’s English translation of Oken’s Lehrbuch (§§44, 105, 3953; 1847: 9, 27, 657), which Mansel owned. In the satire, these professors, meant to lampoon colleagues such as Jowett and Stanley (who was on the Commission), seek to introduce German idealist philosophy, and specifically that of Schelling and Naturphilosophie—that ‘Quantitative Point / Of all Indifference’ (ii.158–159), that ‘two-fold Pole of the Electric One’ (ii.161)—to Oxford. The topic of the philosophy of the unconditioned had long been on Mansel’s radar. When Whewell engaged Mansel on the question of the reception of Kant in Britain, his reply, published in 1853, showed a detailed understanding of the contours of post-Kantian philosophy. ‘If Kant gave to the unconditioned a shadowy existence in the dreams of the speculative reason’, Mansel wrote, ‘it was natural that his successors should attempt to interpret the dream, and behind the shadow to grasp the substance’ (1873: 179). Schelling’s attempt ‘based his philosophy on the fiction of an Intellectual Intuition emancipated from the conditions of space and time’, Mansel notes, with the word ‘fiction’ damning the attempt from the outset. He calls Schelling’s Anschauung a moment of ‘mystical ecstasy’, but one which rests on ‘the important and instructive confession, that to grasp the absolute we must transcend consciousness; that to attain to a knowledge of God as He is, man must himself be God’ (1873: 180). Schelling is thereby denounced for atheism, with Mansel noting that such a philosophy may escape ‘self-destruction […] only by an act of suicide’ (1873: 181), alluding to Novalis’ critique of Fichte. Mansel’s thought here was guided not simply by Hamilton, for he quotes Schelling and the other German thinkers he engages with in the original, as well as owing an intellectual debt to John Daniel Morell, who had studied at Glasgow under Thomas Brown and then in 1841–1842 with Fichte’s son, Immanuel Hermann (1796–1879), at Bonn, later translating his Zur Seelenfrage (1859) into English as Contributions to Mental Philosophy (1860). His discussion of Schelling in his most important work, Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1846: 98–131), shows that Morell had a more detailed understanding

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of his philosophy than more famous contemporaries such as Lewes, although he demonstrates in point of fact little evidence of first-hand knowledge, likely deriving his portrait from his notes from Fichte’s lectures. Mansel, who also refers to Morell elsewhere,13 broadly followed his lead in claiming that ‘Schelling has far too gratuitously taken for granted, both the reality of the process, which he terms intellectual intuition, and the reality of the product’ (1846: 128). Nevertheless, it is to Hamilton that Mansel owed the greatest debts. In The Limits of Religious Thought, Mansel argues to the Hamiltonian letter that all human knowledge is one of relation, meaning that it is conditioned. But knowledge of God is of another kind, since there can be no relation with that which transcends the limits of our world. The Absolute, in Mansel’s terms, ‘expresses not a conception, but the negation of a conception, the acknowledgment of the possible existence of a Being concerning whose consciousness we can only make the negative assertion that it is not like our consciousness’ (1858: 16). While Mansel ultimately agrees with Hamilton in his ‘acute and decisive criticism of Schelling’ (1858: 337), and shows an awareness of recent French criticism of Schelling such as that by Joseph William (1793–1853) and Christian Bartholméss (1815–1856) as well as the contributions from American Transcendentalism in the form of Theodore Parker, his opinion was not uninformed. Mansel’s notes to the printed edition of his Bampton lectures show the detailed sourcing for his argument that he found in the work of Schelling and other German thinkers. He quotes or cites the texts of the Methode, the Bruno, Vom Ich, the System (1858: 291, 303, 309, 329, 337, 338, 374, 386), and shows a similar range of sources in his Metaphysics (1860: 306–311). Nevertheless, Mansel differed from Schelling, whose philosophical use of the faculty of Anschauung he deemed a confusion of categories as had Hamilton before him. Mansel had set out to defend the possibility of faith from the Broad Church movement which had sought to modernise theology, scutinising the text of the bible from the perspective of history and a philosophy of reason. Unsurprisingly, then, his Bampton lectures attracted a great deal of controversy from that quarter. In point of fact, Mansel had already identified one of Schelling’s arguments in the Vom Ich as being ‘cognate to, or rather identical with’ that of Maurice (1858: 337), when the latter had argued ‘that eternity is not a lengthening

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out or continuation of time; that they are generically different’ (1853: 430). It was from Maurice that the most sustained theological attack to Mansel’s arguments were levelled. In What is Revelation? (1859), Maurice argued that Mansel’s argument had made the historical reality of the incarnation of the person of Christ an ‘insoluble difficulty’ (1859: 220). Maurice’s issue with Mansel is not so much to do with his reading of philosophy, but the stakes behind his decision to deploy Hamilton’s philosophy right then and there in Oxford in 1858. Although Maurice defends Schelling by reference to his positive philosophy, which showed his ‘recognition of the Christian revelation and the Christian mysteries’ (1859: 342), he also disputes the basic validity of Mansel’s attacks on Naturphilosophie, pointing out that ‘the kind of ridicule which Sir William Hamilton had poured upon’ Schelling was likely a joke which he would have been familiar with ‘from his boyhood’: Yet [Schelling], whose dialectical faculty […] is not disputed by Mr. Mansel, – acquainted with history, interested in the condition of humanity, – amidst the falls of thrones and empires, in the country which most felt the shock of the French earthquake, – could not be withdrawn from these wild inquiries, – could not be prevented from drawing a multitude of disciples after [him], or from influencing more or less decidedly the politics, the religion, even the ordinary life of Germans who knew little of the nature or course of their speculations! (1859: 152–153)

Maurice’s rhetoric here is more effective than his argumentation, but the point was that he recognised the ways in which Mansel’s attack on Schelling was not wholly disinterested: If [Mansel] did not believe England, practical England, was liable to the same danger – if he did not discover indications of it in Oxford […] – he would not have devoted so much time and toil to the subject of his Lectures. (1859: 154)

While Maurice was always likely to defend Schelling, if only on the basis of a kind of Anglo-Coleridgean party loyalty born out his formative relationship with Hare, his attack ultimately rested on his belief in the possibility of a personal relation with God, one which Mansel appeared to argue was impossible.

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A different attack was launched against Mansel and Hamilton by John Stuart Mill. Mill may have known of Schelling in passing as a young man, either through family friends the Grotes (discussed in the next chapter), or diffusely through his father, James Mill, who had translated Villers’ Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence de la réformation de Luther (1804) into English in 1805. Villers was an important French ­conduit for Kantian thought, as we noted in Chapter 2, and in a translator’s editorial note which he appended to Villers’ very short discussion of Naturphilosophie and ‘the bold Schelling’, Mill commented: ‘it may not be improper to remark that [Schelling’s] doctrine […] is yet chiefly composed of arbitrary theories, unsupported by any just evidence, and leading to no useful conclusion’ (Villers 1805: 336). His son’s interest in Schelling can be definitively dated at least to 1833 and his correspondence with John Sterling, then studying in Bonn, who had spoken in a letter of his desire ‘to spend some time at Munich’ with Schelling (Mill 1963a: 168 n.), with Mill replying that he himself felt more favourable towards Schleiermacher.14 Still, he was not completely hostile during these formative years, and in March 1840, Caroline Fox recalled discussing the state of German universities with Mill and his sister Clara, with John apparently holding that ‘Schelling being the president’ and having ‘influence’ was in their favour (Fox 1882: 1: 155). But by the mid 1840s, Mill was descrying Schelling’s ‘vagueness’ in his letters to Auguste Comte (1963b: 652), and the mature philosopher’s hostility to his thought was based on both theological and methodological grounds. In his System of Logic (1843), Mill had attacked ‘the extreme doctrine of the Idealist metaphysicians’, and in a later edition of the same work published in 1856, named Schelling as the prime culprit (1973: 59–60). Writing to his friend, the philosopher Alexander Bain (1818–1903) in 1863, Mill attacked Hamilton, saying that ‘his speculations […] seem to me of no philosophical value except as refutations of Schelling & Hegel, while the use they can be practically put to is shown in Mansel’s detestable, to me absolutely loathsome book’ (1972: 817). Two years later, Mill published his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, in which he took aim at both Hamilton and Mansel. For Mill, Hamilton’s argument was incoherent and, although this was hardly his purpose, it is interesting to see that Mill ends up offering a partial defence of Schelling against Hamilton’s attacks. For Mill, Hamilton had made a straw man of Schelling, who would not ‘have had the slightest objection to admit that our knowledge even of the Absolute is relative, in the sense that it is we

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that know it’ (1979: 33). But ultimately, Mill’s issue with Mansel is to do with the problem of analogy: according to Mill, Mansel denies the possibility of analogy between things which are conditional and the realm of the Unconditioned, whereas for Mill such an analogy was both possible and necessary.15 While the responses to Mansel’s lectures were often hostile, their impact went far further than their author had ever imagined. As James Livingston puts it, Mansel failed ‘to appreciate that his tour de force was a two-edged sword; that there were those who, convinced of the impotence of reason in matters theological, would remain agnostic concerning the claims of Revelation as well’ (1985: 241–242). Huxley, who would coin the term ‘agnostic’ at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869, may have spoken of Hamilton’s essay on ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’ as ‘the original spring of Agnosticism’ (Livingston 1985: 234), but he gave equal credit to Mansel’s text, likening its author ‘to the drunken fellow in Hogarth’s contested election, who is sawing through the signpost at the other party’s public house, forgetting that he is sitting at the other end of it’ (Lyell 1881: 322). The result of Mansel’s lectures was the development of British agnosticism. It was this debate regarding agnosticism which would dominate the intellectual atmosphere of Britain during the 1880s, and Schelling was variously called as a witness for both sides of the argument. In James Muscutt Hodgson’s (1841–1923) Philosophy and Faith (1885), Schelling is pressed to defend Christianity, quoted as asserting that ‘Faith is the principle of all demonstration, the unproveable, self-evident ground of all evidence’ (1885: 25), a phrase which is not actually Schelling’s own and which Hodgson lifts from Hartmann (1884: 1: 362). On the other hand, in Richard Bithell’s (1821–1902) Agnostic Problems (1887), Schelling’s influence as a forerunner of agnosticism is acknowledged (1887: 50), while being simultaneously minimised on methodological grounds. For Bithell, the agnostic who relies on Schelling would be ‘like an unwise master-builder, who begins his edifice by suspending the roof-tree to a pivot in the clouds, and then works downwards, instead of placing his foundation, as a wise man would, on the solid cart’ (1887: 11). These kinds of confusions speak in part to the ways in which Schelling’s reputation had developed in different and often contradictory directions, particularly in the years following the waning of Romanticism. Mansel’s attack on Higher Criticism and the Broad Church movement had appealed to Hamilton’s attack on Schelling, but he had ended up

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fertilizing the ground for agnosticism, a system which found scientific support in the theory of evolutionary biology developed by Darwin. In a letter of 7 May 1879, Darwin reflected on the development of his religious views following the publication of The Origin of Species twenty years earlier. ‘In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God’, but ‘I think that generally […] that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind’ (2010: 396). Whether or not he knew as much, Darwin and his fellow agnostics owed the very possibility of calling themselves by this name to a series of earlier British engagements with Schelling.

Notes





1.  See Levere (1981: 202–203). An allusion to Schelling in medical literature dating to 1802 but published in English in 1820, written by Gottfried Christian Reich (1769–1848), makes clear the ways in which an ‘enthusiasm’ for Brown in Germany during the period often meant one for Schelling: ‘my young countrymen still shew too great a propensity towards Mr. Brown’s system. […] Every bearded youth, who has hardly left school, turns author here, and the less knowledge he has of natural philosophy and chemistry, and the more he is acquainted with […] Schelling’s new and indiscernible transcendental idealism, the more eagerly he undertakes the defence of the Scotch reformer’s principles’ (Hill 1820: 99). 2.  Friedrich Schlegel had credited Schelling’s Brownian approach for Caroline’s earlier recuperation, compared to the approach previous applied by the anti-Brunonian, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762–1836), as he made clear in a letter to Schleiermacher: ‘At the beginning Hufeland treated Caroline against the Brownian prescriptions and she rapidly deteriorated; Schelling, however, pestered H. so much that finally he gave in and prescribed her stimulants […] And wonders happened before our eyes’ (Schelling 2002: xiii). But just as Caroline was getting better, Auguste fell ill, and Schelling’s interventions this time failed. 3. Coleridge annotated copies of Ørsted in 1817 and Oken in 1820 and Steffens in 1823, 1825 and 1828. 4. Coleridge had already read Botanic Garden and Zoonomia (Ford 1998: 23), in which Darwin adopted Brown’s theories on irritability (Levere 1981: 202). 5. Coleridge seems to have first met Tieck some years earlier, however. In a marginal note to his copy of the Philosophische Schriften, he wrote: ‘How

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can I explain the strange silence [r]especting Jacob Böemen? The Identity of his [&] Schelling’s System was exulted in by the TIEKS [in] Rome in 1805, to me’ (1998: 427). 6. Indeed, a few years later, in a marginal note to his reading of Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge’s (1794–1867) Neueste Phytochemische Entdeckungen [Latest Phytochemical Discoveries] (1820), dating to the 1820s, Coleridge suggested that he and Green had together ‘evolved’ the law of Polarität in 1817, although, Coleridge’s notebooks show he was using the ideas earlier, and that they were developed in the shadow of his reading of Schelling and Naturphilosophie. 7. See Sloan in Owen (1992: 24–39). 8. The depth of Owen’s knowledge of Oken has been debated: see Rupke (2009: 122). More broadly, the identification of Oken’s thinking with Schelling’s during the mid-nineteenth century was also facilitated by the publication of the Ohioan John Bernhard Stallo’s (1823–1900) General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, published in 1848 in America and London by John Chapman: this contains a chapter on Schelling (214–229) which introduces a long excursus on Oken (230–330). 9.  It would be Sedgwick who would later translate the Grundzüge der Zoölogie (1868) with its arch response to ‘the so-called School of Natural Philosophy’ (1884: 136–137) by Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Claus (1835–1899), opponent of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the German thinker who did perhaps more than any other to popularise Darwin’s ideas on the continent. 10. William Whewell to Julius Charles Hare, 17 February 1832. Trinity Add. Ms.a/215/27. 11.  Whewell translated some of Goethe’s Hexameter Epistles, publishing them in The Athenaeum in 1829: see William Whewell to Julius Charles Hare, 22 February 1844. Trinity Add.Ms.a/215/75. Many years later, he would also publish a translation of Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea in Frazer’s Magazine, 1850: see Dawson Turner to William Whewell, 15 Mar 1849. Trinity Add.Ms.a/213/160. 12. As Edgeworth quipped: ‘My philosophical opinions are at present being de-Kanted – rather so at least – and Schelling is the crystal globe into which they are pouring’ (Graves 1885: 2: 173). 13. Mansel discusses Morell in the letter to Whewell (1873: 80), and he wrote an important review of his work as ‘Modern German Philosophy’ in Bentley’s Quarterly in 1860. In 1862, Mansel wrote to Morell of his ‘debt of gratitude in many ways’, noting that the History ‘was the book, more than any other, [that] gave me a taste for philosophical study’ (Theobald 1891: 23–24), and in his review, Mansel credits Morell with making German philosophy more ‘intelligible to English readers’ (1873: 189).

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14. Sterling notes that from what he had heard of the recent lectures on the philosophy of revelation, Schelling’s views ‘present a very remarkable conformity to those of Coleridge, for he too maintains that the Christian Mysteries are the highest Truths of Reason & that it is either necessary to assume or possible to prove every one of them a priori’, and he compares Schelling favourably to Schleiermacher (Mill 1963: 168 n.). For Mill, writing in reply, ‘the question between Schelling’s view and Schleiermacher’s is the one great question on the subject of religion. My own views as far as I have any fixed ones are much nearer to Schleiermacher’s than to Schelling’s and Coleridge’s’ (Mill 1963: 168). 15. On Mill’s response to Mansel on analogy and its significance for British agnosticism, see Livingston (1985: 242–244).

Works Cited Anon. 1816. Critical Review of the State of Medicine During the Last Ten Years. Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 12: 385–411. Beddoes, Thomas. 1793. Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence. London: J. Johnson. ———. 1796. Dr. Beddoes on Kant. Monthly Magazine and British Register 1 (4): 265–267. Bithell, Richard. 1887. Agnostic Problems. London: Williams and Norgate. Burgon, John. 1888. Twelve Good Men, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Brown, John. 1795. The Elements of Medicine, trans. Thomas Beddoes, 2 vols. London: J. Johnson. Caneva, Kenneth L. 1997. Physics and Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaisance. History of Science 35: 35–106. Claus, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm. 1884. Elementary Text-Book of Zoology: General Part, trans. Adam Sedgwick, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Coburn, Kathleen. 1974. Coleridge: A Bridge Between Science and Poetry. In Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies, ed. John Beer, 81–100. London: Macmillan. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume I, 1785–1800, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1957. Notebooks I, 1794–1804, ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1959. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume IV, 1815– 1819, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1969. The Friend (Part II). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4, ed. Barbara E. Rooke. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1971. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume V, 1820–1825, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1973. Notebooks III, 1808–1819, ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments I. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 11, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. Marginalia IV. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 12, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Darwin, Charles. 2010. Evolutionary Writings including the Autobiographies, ed. James A. Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davy, John. 1836. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 2 vols. London: Longman et al. Duncan, David. 1911. Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. London: Williams & Norgate. Faraday, Michael. 1822. Historical Sketch of Electro-Magnetism. Annals of Philosophy [n.s] 3 (2): 107–122. Ford, Jennifer. 1998. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, Caroline. 1882. Memories of Old Friends, ed. H.N. Pym, 2 vols., 2nd ed. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Friedman, Michael. 2013. Philosophy of Natural Science in Idealism and NeoKantianism. In The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought. Volume I, Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks, 72–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graves, Robert Perceval. 1885. Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 3 vols. London: Longman, Green & Co. Green, J.H. 1840. Vital Dynamics. London: William Pickering. ———. 1865. Spiritual Philosophy, ed. John Simon, 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Hill, Daniel. 1820. Practical Observations on the Use of Oxygen, 2nd ed. London: F., C. & J. Rivington. Hodgson, James Muscutt. 1885. Philosophy and Faith: A Plea for Agnostic Belief. Manchester: Brook and Chrystal. Kant, Immanuel. 1902–66. GS. Gesammelte Schriften, 23 vols. Berlin: AkademieAusgabe. ———. 2002a. Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, ed. Henry Allison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002b. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman. In Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, ed. by Henry Allison, 171– 270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Knox, Robert. 1850. The Races of Men: A Fragment. London: H. Renshaw. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1977. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lenoir, Timothy. 1980. Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology. Isis 71 (1): 77–108. Levere, Trever H. 1968. Faraday, Matter, and Natural Theology—Reflections on an Unpublished Manuscript. British Journal for the History of Science 4 (2): 95–107. ———. 1977. Coleridge, Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Nature. Studies in Romanticism 16 (3): 349–379. ———. 1981. Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Livingston, James C. 1985. British Agnosticism. Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West: Volume II, ed. Ninian Smart et al., 231–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyell, Charles. 1881. Life, Letters and Journals, vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Mansel, H.L. 1851. Prolegomena Logica. Oxford: William Graham. ———. 1856. Artis Logicae Rudimenta. Oxford: William Graham. ———. 1858. The Limits of Religious Thought Examined. Oxford: J. Wright. ———. 1860. Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Consciousness. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. ———. 1873. Letters, Lectures and Reviews, ed. H.W. Chandler. London: J. Murray. ———. 2018. Phrontisterion, ed. Giles Whiteley. Victorian Literature and Culture 46 (2): 485–514. Maurice, F.D. 1853. Theological Essays, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Macmillan. ———. 1859. What is Revelation? Cambridge: Macmillan. Mill, J.S. 1963a. The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XII, ed. Francis E. Mineka. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1963b. The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XIII, ed. Francis E. Mineka. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1972. The later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849–1873. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XV, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1979. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume IX, ed. J.M. Robson and Alan Ryan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morell, J.D. 1846. Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. London: William Pickering.

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Morley, Edith J. 1929. Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800–1805. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neubauer, John. 1967. Dr. John Brown and Early German Romanticism. Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (3): 367–382. Oken, Lorenz. 1847. Elements of Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk. London: Ray Society. Owen, Richard. 1847. Report on the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton. In Report of the Sixteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 169–340. London: John Murray. ———. 1849. On the Nature of Limbs. London: John van Voorst. ———. 1860. Darwin on the Origin of Species. Edinburgh Review 11: 487–532. ———. 1992. The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy May–June, 1837, ed. Phillip Reid Sloan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prati, Gioacchino. 1837. An Autobiography. The Penny Satirist 20 (2 September): 1–2. Rehbock, Philip F. 1983. The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century Biology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Richards, Robert J. 2013. The Impact of German Idealism and Romanticism on Biology in the Nineteenth Century. In The Impact of Idealism: Volume 1, Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks, 105–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rigg, James Harrison. 1866. Essays for the Times. London: Elliot Stock. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London: Macmillan. Rupke, Nicolaas A. 2008. Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. Richard Owen: Biology Without Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schelling, Friedrich. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 2000. The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2002. Clara, or on Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World, trans. Fiona Steinkamp. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2004. First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Pearson. Albany: SUNY Press. Sloan, Phillip R. 2007. Kant, and British Bioscience. In Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology, ed. Philippe Huneman, 149–171. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

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Stallo, J.B. 1848. General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature. London: John Chapman. Tieck, Ludwig. 1973. Nachgelassene Schriften, Band 1, ed. Rudolf Köpke. Berlin, De Gruyter. Theobald, Robert M. 1891. Memorials of John Daniel Morell. London: W. Stewart & Co. Verburgt, Lukas M. 2015. Robert Leslie Ellis, William Whewell and Kant: The Role of Rev. H.F.C. Logan. Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 31 (1): 47–51. Villers, Charles. 1805. An Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation of Luther, trans. James Mill. London: C. & R. Baldwin. von Hartmann, Eduard. 1884. Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland, 3 vols. London: Trübner. Wallen, Martin. 2005. The Electromagnetic Orgasm and the Narrative of Primordiality in Schelling’s 1815 Cosmic History. In Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings, ed. Jason M. Wirth, 122–134. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Williams, L. Pearce. 1965. Michael Faraday: A Biography. London: Chapman & Hall. ———. 1971. Michael Faraday. In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 18 vols., 4 vols., 527–540. New York: Scribner’s. Whewell, William. 1837. History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. London: John W. Parker. ———. 1840. Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. ———. 1860. On the Philosophy of Discovery. London: John W. Parker.

CHAPTER 9

Schelling and the British Universities

We have seen throughout this book that the received picture of nineteenth-century British intellectual life has over-simplified the level of interest in German philosophical traditions. According to this narrative, the Romanticism of the first three decades saw a reaction during the following fifty years in which positivism, empiricism and utilitarianism supposedly triumphed, only to be itself challenged by the dominance of Hegel and British idealism in the universities between 1880 and the First World War. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 6, this received picture ignores the ways in which Schelling’s philosophy found sympathetic readers both in Edinburgh, with William Hamilton, and in Cambridge, with Hare, Whewell and generations of Apostles. This portrait of British intellectual life has been guilty of conflating the story of Schelling’s reception with the story of the reception of Hegel. This chapter develops the point, showing the extent to which Schelling influenced a number of significant figures from the middle of the century onwards in universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, London and Manchester. Beginning with the ways in which Schelling informed mid-century debates around the role and structure of the universities, and also considering the ways in which British idealism engaged with and ultimately sought to minimise the significance of Schelling’s philosophy in the later years of the century, the aim is to provide a more rounded understanding of the ways in which reading Schelling was important in the British universities of the nineteenth century. © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_9

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Schelling the Model Professor The mid nineteenth century saw a concerted debate regarding the role that should be played by university education in modern Britain. Particular inspiration for this movement came from Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), older brother of Alexander. Wilhelm founded Berlin University in 1810, based on the Enlightenment ideal of Bildung: the Humboldtian model sought to educate the individual in the broadest sense possible through a process of free enquiry, through which it aimed to produce autonomous subjects who could be cosmopolitan thinkers, world citizens. In this, Humboldt had been partially inspired by Schelling’s Methode, alongside a number of other tracts on the German universities by Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher and others. The Methode did not appear in English until 1877, when it was translated by Ella S. Morgan in the American Journal of Speculative Philosophy, but we have seen that many of Schelling’s early British readers quoted from the text, which was particularly influential on the brothers Hare. As early as 1803, Crabb Robinson had translated an essay on the German universities by Friedrich Savigny in the Monthly Register, and British periodicals carried occasional notices of Schelling’s own role in the German university system. An anonymous note in the Monthly Review of June 1828, noted that ‘the king of Baviaria is unceasing in his efforts to promote the improvement of education’ and had duly sent for Schelling: ‘the result was a complete freedom of studies in the university of München; [and] the only requisite at the final examination will be – knowledge’ (Anon. 1828: 278). But the debate regarding the so-called ‘German model’ of university education, and what potential benefits it may bring to British institutions, began in earnest a few years thereafter, around the mid-1830s. In the minds of those pushing for reform, the stakes were not only pedagogical but also political. Baden Powell (1796–1860) and James Heywood (1810–1897), incentivized by the opportunities they saw being opened up by the 1832 Reform Act, published statistical evidence demonstrating that student numbers at Oxford were dwindling and that a number of already rich colleges were doing little to broaden their appeal (Curthoys 1997: 158–159). In 1837, Whewell intervened by publishing a pamphlet On the Principles of English University Education. Whewell’s vision of a liberal education was grounded in the study of the natural sciences and the classics, and although he was sympathetic towards German philosophy, he was critical

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of the Humboldtian model. The German return to the ‘speculative’ had not produced the results that had been expected, for while ‘their professors deliver from their chairs system after system to admiring audiences’, the results were underwhelming. German universities produced such men as to be utterly incapable even of comprehending […] the most conspicuous examples of the advance of science. Those who are universally allowed to be the greatest philosophers of our own day in the German universities, Hegel and Schelling, cannot understand that Newton went further than Kepler had gone in physical astronomy. (1837: 25)

The German professors, Whewell opines, are less interested in the furthering of thought than being the next big thing: Fichte topples Kant, Schelling topples Fichte, Hegel topples Schelling, ‘and thus, with a dire shedding of ink, revolution after revolution succeeds’ (1837: 48). Not everyone agreed with Whewell’s comments however and a debate regarding the role of professorships at Oxford and Cambridge became a central question. As James Martineau put it, while ‘the system may protect us […] from a race of conceited students’, it also risked lessening ‘the chance that, in teachers, we shall have eminent philosophers, and accounts for the fact that for the last century Cambridge and Oxford have produced no names that came be mentioned’ in the same breathe as Schelling (1891: 3: 379). With Heywood elected to a seat as MP for North Lancashire in 1847, and Jowett and Stanley publishing a pamphlet campaigning for reform in 1848, Prime Minister Russell announced a Royal Commission to investigate the universities in 1850. It was this Commission, comprising something of a who’s-who of Victorian liberals including both Stanley and Powell, which occasioned Mansel’s satire Phrontisterion, discussed in Chapter 8, in which German Professors are pastiched as the intellectual progeny of Schelling amongst others. As his fictional Commissioner puts it, Professors, man, Professors are the thing. They’ll mould and model English education On the best German plan. (ii.56–58)

But while the resulting report of 1852 extolled the virtue of Professors alongside the benefits of the traditional system of college fellowships, not everyone was happy.

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A fascinating exchange in the aftermath of the publication of the Commission’s Report took the figure of Schelling as symbolic of the German Professor in general. Taking umbrage with what he perceived to be anti-Professorial comments submitted in evidence to the Commission by Pusey, Henry Halford Vaughan (1811–1885), then Regius Professor of History at Oxford, offered a reply. Vaughan’s argument was hopelessly inconsistent: on the one hand, he chastised Pusey for being too enamoured by German philosophy, specifically giving Schelling as an example of a thinker who had not stood the test of time, having ‘bubbled, babbled, and passed away’ (1854: 61); on the other hand, only two pages later, Vaughan mobilized the name of Schelling as exemplary when noting that he had ‘filled the world’ with his fame (1854: 63). ‘As to the possible utility of Professors’, Vaughan appeals to ‘the language of one who constantly attended’ Schelling’s lectures: It is not the knowledge communicated […] which may be got by books, but it is the magical effect of a great Professor, the grandeur, the purity, and the freshness of his manner of dealing with a subject, and expressing himself upon it. I never can forget the effect of Schelling […] upon myself. Such a man lecturing on one subject, threw some rays of light into the mind of all students of all subjects. (1854: 104)

One can only assume that the auditor was not one of those who heard Schelling’s Berlin lectures, discussed in Chapter 5. In his Collegiate and Professorial Teaching and Discipline, published later that same year, Pusey clarified that the contrast he had sought to draw ‘was between the Collegiate and Professorial systems. It was not between Tutors and Professors, but between two modes of communicating knowledge and instructing the mind’ (1854: 4). It was all very well praising the Professorial system and appealing to the big names of German thought, but the system had not, Pusey contended, produced lasting results. Whatever their philosophical value, figures such as Schelling have only a ‘transient autocracy’ (1854: 57). The point also perhaps recalls the transience of Pusey’s own sympathetic response to Schelling a quarter of a decade earlier in his Historical Enquiry (1828). In his later text, Pusey quotes Shakespeare, characterising Schelling as ‘a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no longer’ (Macbeth, 5.5.23–25), a point of added poignancy given the date of publication, the year that Schelling died. ‘Systems of

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philosophy were like fashions of dress’, Pusey concludes in Carlylean fashion: ‘first, absolute, then obsolete’ (1854: 57). And Pusey could not help but address Vaughan’s anecdote regarding Schelling’s ‘magical’ lecturing. He replied by quoting ‘the statement of an intellectual layman, who, at a mature age, in 1834’, also heard Schelling: [His] delivery was so slow in order not to outrun the pens of the students, as to be tedious and almost repulsive. […] Altogether the English are mistaken about German lectures, which are often ex necessitate rei, heavy affairs. (1854: 14)

Friedrich Savigny seemed to have broadly concurred with Pusey’s ‘layman’, and in a letter to Crabb Robinson dating to some thirty years beforehand in January 1803, he noted that there exists a class of ‘real geniuses who are great in practice’—‘such a genius Schelling is not’ (Robinson 1869: 1: 136). For Savigny, ‘the whole art of a teacher consists in methodologically quickening the productive energy of the pupil, and making him find out science for himself’: ‘Nothing can be more opposite than the diffuse way in which Schelling authoritatively forces his ideas on crude understandings’ (1869: 1: 137). But regardless of whose portrait of Schelling was the more accurate, the debate between Pusey and Vaughan demonstrates the ways in which Schelling was no longer regarded simply as a philosopher by the British, but had become a celebrity. The idea of Schelling as the model Professor was alluded to in Alexander John Scott’s inaugural lecture at the opening of Owens College, Manchester. Scott had been a minister in Scotland, befriending Thomas Erskine, who had met Schelling, and John McLeod Campbell. After Erskine and his associates came under increasing attack from traditional Calvinists, Scott had moved to London in 1828 to join Edward Irving (1792–1834) in Westminster, and through him came to meet Coleridge and Carlyle, and later became friends with Hare, Kingsley, Maurice, Newman, Ruskin and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863). In 1848, he had been one of the founders of Christian socialism and was appointed the first principle of Owens College in 1850.1 In a lecture at Manchester Town Hall on 3 October 1851, Scott took up the question of British education from a perspective informed by his Christian socialist beliefs. For Scott, ‘universities are not to be defined as the means of preparing men for certain vocations’ (1852: 6),

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but rather to develop ‘the whole mind and character of the scholar’, one which had been expanded by ‘his academic pursuits, fitting him the better for humane, large, and lofty functions’ (1852: 7). Scott’s argument was recognisably rooted in the German ideal of Bildung, but somewhat paradoxically, he argued that it was precisely through being exposed to great Professors such as Schelling that the modern student might avoid the pitfalls of transcendental speculation. ‘A German diplomatist’ may not need to attend Schelling’s lectures in order to discharge their duties, Scott argued, but they did so, and ‘the more they learned, the less likely will they be to obtrude the methods or propositions of metaphysical or dialectical science into their respective business’, while ‘the more comprehensiveness, resource, and mental finish’ they would display. It was this more rounded, holistic educational ideal which lies as ‘the object of [German] academic instruction’ (1852: 7), explaining why ‘men in our own time run to be taught by anyone who has dedicated themselves to know and understand that of which he is to speak’, with Scott naming Schelling here again (1852: 22). As we saw in Chapter 7, Manchester and the North West of England had already seen a sustained interest in Schelling’s philosophy during the late 1830s in the Unitarian network of figures such as Tayler, Thom, Robberds and Martineau. And the association would continue after Scott’s death. When the economist William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) left Manchester for the Chair of Political Economy at London in 1876, his replacement as Owens College was Robert Adamson (1852–1902). Having been educated in Edinburgh, Adamson had spent the summer of 1871 at Heidelberg, before working under Henry Calderwood, famous for his critique of Hamilton in The Philosophy of the Infinite (1854), and Alexander Campbell Fraser (1819–1914), who had succeeded Hamilton as Professor of Logic at Edinburgh in 1846. Adamson would write the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Schelling for the 9th edition (1889), having beaten James Sully to the post at Owens College, whose testimonial for the position was written by his old tutor, Hermann Lotze.2 Before arriving at Manchester, Scott had been Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London, appointed in November 1848. A year later, he had been one of the founders of Bedford College, the first non-denominational centre of higher education for women in Britain. In his introductory lecture, Scott made the case that a versing in Schelling should be an important element of women’s education. Since Schelling ‘appeal[s] not merely to the intellectual,

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but to the spiritual man’, Scott believed that his philosophy, like that of Plato or Plotinus, had been unfairly marginalised in all-male educational contexts, ‘this border-land between abstraction and actual life, between science and practical morals’ (1849: 7). The argument today seems hopelessly essentialist, suggesting that women are more suited to a ‘spiritual’ life compared to the supposedly more ‘manly’ sphere of practical education, but offers an insight into the ways in which other British higher educational institutions were beginning to open up to Schelling during the middle of the nineteenth century. To find such an argument being developed in London, and by Scott, then a Professor in the capital, was perhaps unsurprising. London University (today University College London) was conceived in part as a British response to the new University of Berlin. Whereas Oxford in particular needed the successive controversies of the Tractarian movement and the Commission to help the cause of new liberal thinkers such as Jowett and Stanley, University College was from its inception modelled on liberal philosophies, opening up higher education for Dissenters. The University had been promoted by figures such as James Mill, father to John Stuart, and his then disciple, the historian George Grote (1794–1871). The first Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Mind at the new University was John Hoppus (1789–1875), who had studied in Edinburgh under Stewart. Eventually appointed in 1830 against the wishes of Grote, who felt that no ordained minister should hold the position in a nondenominational institution such as the new London University,3 Hoppus wrote about German universities in The Continent in 1835 (1836). There, Hoppus was measured in his appreciation of Schelling: Schelling’s system, though of a pantheistic complexion, as identifying the Deity with nature, has nevertheless been regarded by some friends of the truth as leading to a species of reflection ultimately favourable to a transition to the genuine doctrines of Christianity. (1836: 1: 185)

Showing the influence of his fellow Scot Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh on the ‘natural supernaturalism’ of Schelling’s philosophy, Hoppus speaks of the ‘rational-supernaturalists, and supernatural-naturalists’ (1836: 1: 189) of German Biblical critics such as de Wette, before concluding that ‘of all philosophers, Schelling may be mentioned as at present

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entertaining views more in harmony […] with the doctrines of revelation’ (1834: 1: 191). While Hoppus shows a grasp of the contours of post-Kantian philosophy in this work, he does not demonstrate any first hand acquaintance with Schelling’s work. This defect was somewhat remedied in The Crisis of Popular Education, published in 1847. There, he again weighed in on the question of German universities. Speaking of ‘the ingenuity, the acuteness, the power of abstract thought’ of professors like Schelling, Hoppus also implicitly criticises him for taking ‘the course of the aëronaut’ and losing himself ‘in the clouds’ (1847: 101). In this work, Hoppus shows a more nuanced understanding of the current state of German thought, quoting and translating from Die Religion der Vernunft (1824) by Friedrich Bouterwek (1766–1828) on Schelling’s theology. For Hoppus, only a student who had studied under a great thinker such as Schelling ‘may go forth into Society as the representative of the University of London’ (1847: 272). And it was around this time that Hoppus himself began to work extensively on post-Kantian philosophy. In 1857–1858, he gave two courses of lectures: the first on Schelling’s philosophy, 1795–1800, the second on Schelling’s philosophy after 1800 (Hicks 1928: 470–471). To offer not one, but two lecture courses on Schelling shows the continued interest in, and indeed appetite for, his philosophy during this supposedly barren period. And Hoppus’ successors continued the tradition of reading Schelling at London, first in the person of George Croom Robertson (1842–1892), who had studied under Emil du Bois-Reymond at Berlin, becoming smitten with German idealist philosophy and later founding the journal Mind in 1876, and then in 1892 when Sully was elected to the Grote Chair of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic.

Schelling and British Idealism It has generally been assumed that the tide began to turn against Schelling and German philosophy in Cambridge during the second half of the nineteenth century. Adam Sedgwick’s famous dissertation, which he added to the revised edition of A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge (1850), has been taken as emblematic of the hostility that Schelling supposedly found in Victorian Cambridge during the second half of the nineteenth century. In it, Sedgwick roundly attacked idealism, quoting William Hodge Mill on Schelling’s pantheism,

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‘with whose opinion I heartily concur’ (1850: cclxiv; quoting Mill 1840: 22). But in point of fact, idealism still had some advocates in Cambridge and when Whewell resigned the Knightsbridge Professorship in 1855, he was replaced by John Grote (1813–1866). John came from an illustrious intellectual stock: George, his older brother, who became famous as a classical historian for his twelve volume History of Greece (1846–1856), had at one time been a close acquaintance of John Stuart Mill and come under the influence of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).4 While George shows little real interest in Schelling in his published work, apparently referring to him only once in print in a single note on Hamilton (1865: 2: 343), in private the situation was seemingly different, and it seems likely that it was through his influence that John first came into contact with idealism. In 1818 Crabb Robinson recorded meeting George at a dinner with their mother, Selina Grote (1774–1845), ‘a merchant who reads German, and appears to be an intelligent, sensible man, having a curiosity for German philosophy as well as German poetry’ (1869: 2: 109). His wife, Harriet (1792–1878), later recorded George’s ‘furious onset of Kantism’ in 1833 (1873: 29). Nor did his interest entirely end as he entered middle age. Grote’s commonplace book shows his reading of Rudolf Haym (1821–1901) on Schelling in the late 1850s (Grote 1872: 200). Years earlier in August 1841, Harriet corresponded with Sarah Austin, then in Carlsbad, who met Schelling while he was holidaying (1872: 66), and became friendly with Varnhagen von Ense, with whom she and George discussed Schelling in August 1845 (1862: 174). When he died, George Grote bequeathed his library to the University, including his copies of both Schelling’s Ideen and the Philosophische Schriften (Nichols 1876: 640). In this context, John Grote’s idealism seems less curious given these insights into the intellectual development of his brother.5 But if Schelling had found his earliest British university audiences in Edinburgh and Cambridge, then in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was at Oxford where his influence came to be most keenly felt. Of course, while Jowett and Stanley were sympathetic to Schelling, his philosophy was not immediately welcomed by all, and Mansel’s Phrontisterion and The Limits of Religious Thought demonstrate keenly a residual Tory hostility towards German ideas. In the footsteps of some of Jowett’s most precocious students, and particularly Thomas Hill Green, a new philosophical movement was born: British idealism. But

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although this movement led to an increased interest in German philosophy in British universities, particularly in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, it prioritised the thought of Kant and especially Hegel at the expense of Schelling. Taken as a whole, the British idealists tended to treat Schelling strategically, focusing variously on either the early Naturphilosophie, which had been made ‘obsolete’ (Stirling’s term) by Hegel, or the late positive philosophy, considered incoherent, riddled with mysticism, and lacking the cold analytical precision found in Kant. That the influence of Schelling has become something of a forgotten story in the writing of the histories of nineteenth-century British philosophy is, in part, a symptom of the success of British idealism. To better understand the beginnings of the movement, it is instructive to compare two texts published in 1865. The first was a survey of Recent British Philosophy by David Masson (1822–1907). Masson had been educated in Edinburgh, meeting de Quincey and, in Florence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), and later becoming close friends with both Carlyle and Mill. He succeeded Clough to the Chair of English Literature at London University in 1852, editing Macmillan’s Magazine in the late 1850s, before returning to Edinburgh to take up the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature in 1865. According to Masson, while Schelling had his British adherents during the first half of the century, ‘Hegel remains unknown, save in a specimen-phrase or two’ (1867: 11). Masson’s own knowledge of Schelling appears to be limited, reliant in particular on Hamilton (1867: 91–102), who he refers to as ‘the best recent authority’ in Britain (1867: 50), and he sides with the Germans and Scots on the relative merits of Schelling and Coleridge (1867: 38). However, Masson registers a vital shift in philosophical direction to have been inaugurated with Ferrier’s interpretation of Schelling, and if a British species of idealism were to have a future, he contends that would be embodied in Ferrier’s creative re-reading of Schelling (1867: 179). Hegel, by contrast, is simply ‘the terrible Hegel, the brain-benumbing Hegel’ (1867: 184). Masson’s words were hardly prophetic, however, and the portrait he painted in Recent British Philosophy may be usefully compared with that drawn the same year by James Hutchison Stirling in The Secret of Hegel (1865). While Masson’s Recent British Philosophy has today largely been forgotten, the impact of Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel continues to be recognised for its significance in shaping late nineteenth-century philosophical debates in Britain. For Kirk Willis, Stirling’s book amounts to

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a Hegelian ‘propaganda effort’ (1988: 86), and we can recognise some the tactics of a classic smear campaign in his treatment of Schelling in his preface to the text, which polemically sought to redescribe the history of nineteenth-century German philosophy. Stirling begins speculatively and playfully, building up Schelling as a straw man. The argument runs as follows: Schelling’s Berlin lectures constituted ‘the absolutely definitive sentence’ on Hegel’s philosophy (1865: 1: xvii), damning and issued from the seat of unimpeachable authority, so that, with Schelling’s ascension to Hegel’s Chair, the German experiment with absolute idealism had come to an end. ‘The whole thing had been but an intellectual fever’, Stirling argues, ‘and was now at an end, self-stultified by the admission of its own dream’ (1: xviii). In the years after Schelling’s lectures, philosophers had been left with an alternative, Stirling contends: ‘either grant German Philosophy obsolete, or prefer yourself to Schelling.’ (1: xx) Stirling’s argument here rests on a series of fallacies. The idea that one might prefer Schelling Stirling considers ‘ridiculous’, in an argumentum ad lapidem, before he appeals to an argumentum ex silentio, resting his case on the supposed ‘historical truth, that the sentence of Schelling, however infallible its apparent authority, has not, in point of fact, been accepted’ (1: xxii). Stirling considers Schelling’s attack on Hegel irredeemably biased, quoting Haym who uses the epithets ‘spiteful’ and ‘envious’ to describe their relationship. Stirling then appeals to another fallacious argument, the idea that correlation proves causation, so that the fact that Schelling was not widely read in Germany supposedly showed that he was intrinsically less worth-while than Hegel. ‘Indeed’, reading Schelling at all ‘seems unnecessary’, Stirling continues, given his ‘life-long inconsistency, stained too by the malice, and infected by the ineptitude’ of the Berlin years (1: xxiiii). ‘The verdict of Schelling’, Stirling concludes, ‘seems practically set aside by the mere progress of time’ (1: xxv). Stirling’s hatchet job may have arisen from an earnest distaste for both the man and his work, although there are moments when he seems to forget himself, such as when he compares Schelling favourably with Coleridge (1: 28–29), or when comparing his writing style with that of Hegel (1: 23). But if the depth of Stirling’s knowledge of Schelling is actually unclear on the basis of The Secret of Hegel, such a potential flaw in fact mattered very little: his appeal was always intended to be polemical, doctrinal and evangelical. We see as much in his double standards when comparing his portraits of Schelling and Hegel. While

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his text presents Hegel as a somewhat unlikeable figure, cold and calculating, someone who unceremoniously and somewhat cruelly uses Schelling’s name to further his own career (1: 23–26), then this portrait is drawn from the position of someone with a deep respect for Hegel’s achievements: Hegel has a brassier and tougher determination to be original at all costs than Schelling. He attacks all, and he reconciles all. He is as resolute a Cheap-John, as cunning and unscrupulous and unhesitating as a hawker, as ever held up wares in market. (1: 66)

The cockney slang makes Hegel into a cosmopolitan figure, an itinerant lower-class hustler like Dickens’ Dr. Marigold. Schelling, by comparison, ranks as ‘a susceptible, ardent stripling - a creature of books and the air of chambers’. ‘If ever man dropped into the grave an “exasperated stripling” of fourscore’, Stirling concludes, ‘it was Schelling’ (1: 65–66). The quotation turns Schelling into Teufelsdröckh, alluding to Carlyle’s meditation on the problem of ‘getting under way’. For Stirling, Schelling finds himself ironically striving after an impossible ideal, unable to fulfil his youthful promises. ‘Many so spend their whole term, and in ever new expectation, ever new disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side’, Teufelsdröckh reflects, ‘till at length, as exasperated striplings of threescore and ten, they shift into their last enterprise, that of getting buried’ (1987: 93). Stirling’s title tells us a lot about how he expected people to approach his text: it promised to lay bare the ‘secret’ of Hegel. And his work came at an opportune moment, for while Masson was broadly correct when pointing out that up until 1865 Hegel had been either ignored or minimised in favour of Schelling, thereafter their relative fortunes began to change. A new movement, one which came to be known as British idealism, began to gain traction in the work of Green and his colleagues. Green had entered Balliol in 1855 and come under the influence of Jowett, through whom he first engaged with German idealism (Richter 1964: 71, 88–91, 171–172). Green settled into college life, first in 1860 as a Fellow, and later in 1874 as Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. Green himself was both a Kantian and a Hegelian, although he was sometimes charged by his contemporaries such as Thomas Case (1844–1925), then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, of inconsistency in his conflation of these two different systems (Richter

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1964: 186). It is perhaps somewhat surprising in this context to find that Green never quotes Schelling once in his published work, and allusions to Schelling in his unpublished manuscripts are few and far between, never seemingly in the original, always as mediated through other writers such as Hegel.6 While there are seemingly points of comparison between Naturphilosophie and the idea of the ‘Spiritual Principle in Nature’, which he discusses in his posthumously published Prolegomena to Ethics (1883: 22–58), Green’s emphasis on the subject as the one who sustains this Spiritual Principle puts him closer to the idealism of Berkeley than Schelling. Ultimately, Green remains too close to Kant on the one side and Hegel on the other to have found much of interest in Schelling. The situation is a little more complex for some of the other key figures of British idealism. Edward Caird, who had studied at St. Andrews and Glasgow, went up to Balliol on a Snell exhibition in 1860 where he too came under the influence of Jowett. He was the younger brother of John (1820–1898), the theologian who would be appointed Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow in 1862. Caird was a mature student, entering Oxford aged twenty-five and becoming firm friends with Green, by then a Fellow. He was elected Tutor at Merton College, before returning north of the border in 1866 to take up the position as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. There he provided an idealist counterpoint to John Veitch, who had been elected Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow two years beforehand (Robert Adamson would succeed him to the Chair in 1895). Having served as an assistant lecturer to Hamilton in his younger days and later becoming his biographer, Veitch was waging something of a war on idealism in the west of Scotland, with Schelling damned as prone to ‘wholly illegitimate and illogical abstraction’ (1889: 294). Caird’s appointment in part served to reorientate the philosophical direction at the university. Like his close friend Green, Caird was a Hegelian, but unlike Green, we can be certain that Caird had read Schelling in the original. It was while in Glasgow that Caird wrote his essay on ‘Goethe and Philosophy’, first published in the Contemporary Review in 1886, in which he discussed Goethe’s youthful flirtations with Schelling’s philosophy. There, he quotes from Schelling’s Denkmal, summing up Goethe’s attempt to distance himself from pantheism, ‘a godless nature and an unnatural God’ (1892: 1: 85; quoting SW I.8, 70); it was a phrase which Caird would reuse the following year in his entry on ‘Cartesianism’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1892: 2: 361). While Caird quoted the System approvingly

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in The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1889: 1: 413; quoting SW I.3, 394; HKA I.9, 85; 1978: 46), he seemed to be more impressed with the later rather than the earlier Schelling. He dismisses the identity philosophy which culminated in the Freiheitsschrift saying that the ‘liberty of indifference is an absurdity: it is the liberty of the void’ (1889: 2: 270). But it was perhaps in the form of one of his most illustrious students that Caird’s importance to the history of Schelling’s reception lies. John Watson (1847–1939) had studied under Caird at Glasgow, and in 1874 he recommended him for the vacant Chair of Logic, Metaphysics, and Ethics at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Eight years later, Watson published Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism (1882). While Watson has a tendency to over-systematise Schelling’s philosophy in his so-called ‘critical exposition’, it was a landmark text, the first monograph devoted exclusively to Schelling’s philosophy in the English language. Other than Watson, the most important reader of Schelling found among the ranks of the British idealists was William Wallace. Wallace entered Balliol in 1864, becoming another illustrious student of Jowett’s, making Fellow of Merton College in 1867 and its librarian in 1871, before succeeding Green as Whyte Professor in 1882. Today, Wallace is best remembered (and still read) as a translator of Hegel, but he had broad interests in post-Kantian German philosophy: in addition to publishing The Logic and Prolegomena of Hegel (1873), he authored a book on Epicureanism (1880), a short book on Kant (1882) and The Life of Arthur Schopenhauer (1890), as well as writing numerous essays, including early English work on Nietzsche. His interest in Schelling was keen, sympathetic and historical, and Wallace read extensively around Schelling’s philosophy. Wallace differs from Green, whose silence on the philosophical developments between Kant and Hegel may be taken as symbolic to the status he accords such developments. Unlike Green, Wallace takes seriously the provocations of Schelling that ‘the modifications of consciousness which we invest with externality are really produced by mental agency’, noting that ‘Kant himself hardly discusses’ the problem of the apperception ‘from these points of view’ (1882: 180). The breadth of Wallace’s interests, and his broad sympathy with so many different thinkers, sometimes leads him to make startling comparisons. In one of his essays on Nietzsche, Wallace cites the System, saying that the early Nietzsche of Die Geburt der Tragödie [The Birth of Tragedy] (1872) saw in Richard Wagner (1813–1883) ‘the fulfilment of what Schelling demanded, a new mythology in which the ideal (i.e. the truly

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real) world would no longer be, as it is with the philosopher, subject to limitations and tainted by the weakness of subjectivity’ (1898: 519; citing SW I.3, 628; HKA I.9, 329; 1978: 231). More surprising, in his 1892 Gifford Lectures, Wallace characterises A Defense of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (1879) by Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930), later Prime Minister (1902–1905), as a work in which its author ‘has risen to that idea of philosophy to which Schelling’ has ‘given its characteristic modern form’ (1898: 87). In the same Gifford Lectures, Wallace quoted and translated from the System der gesamten Philosophie, asserting on this evidence that the ‘religious spirit’ may be defined as conscientiousness (1898: 58–59; quoting SW I.6, 558–559). Perhaps most tellingly, and unlike other figures associated with British idealism, Wallace was less dismissive of the later Schelling, approving to the extent even of identifying with the voice of the philosopher of the revelation: I say with Schelling, the Schelling of his later time, Christianity is as old as the world: its ideas, its hopes, its faith, its love, are those on which the nobler sons and daughters of humanity have in all ages and in all lands nourished in some measure their inner life, gone forth to meet the world and death. (1898: 182)

For a Hegelian to be sympathetic to positive philosophy, itself conceived as an attempt to deconstruct Hegel’s system, shows the nuance in Wallace’s thinking. Wallace was unlike Green in another, all important manner: his style of writing. Whereas Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics is a tortuous affair, bogged down by contorted syntax and endless qualifying clauses, so that the reader, if not Green himself, is liable to lose the thread, Wallace’s Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy (1894) is an exercise in style. Stirling took two whole volumes to sound out The Secret of Hegel; Wallace, by contrast, needed just one line: ‘perseverance is the secret of Hegel’ (1894: 54). Dedicated to Jowett, this Prolegomena was a revised and augmented second edition of the one which p ­ refaced his 1873 translation of Hegel’s Logik, and extended his engagement with Schelling significantly. The range of Wallace’s quotations and translations from Schelling’s texts, drawn from the Einleitung, Erster Entwurf, Abhandlungen, the Methode and the System (1894: 75, 129, 132–133, 147, 148, 155, 158, 160), show a nuanced appreciation of

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his philosophy, and he includes three new palinodial chapters (1894: 136–172) addressing the historical question of Schelling’s role in the development of Hegel’s philosophy. He concludes one of these new chapters with a lengthy, two-paragraph long quotation from the System on art as the ‘new mythology’ (1894: 161–162; quoting SW I.3, 628; HKA I.9, 329; 1978: 231–232), and in the following chapter offers the first extended analysis of and series of quotations from Schelling’s Bruno in English (1894: 164–167). This text, Wallace argues, constitutes a pre-emptory riposte to both Hamilton and the version of his thought popularised in Oxford by Mansel: ‘this is the Unconditioned, which is the basis and builder of all conditions: the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations’ (1894: 169). In addressing the significance of Schelling as a philosopher, Wallace is at pains to treat Schelling seriously, not as a ‘mystic’, but as a scientist, highlighting both the historical links between his philosophy and Romantic developments in speculative physics and biology, as well as making comparison with Darwin (1894: 83).7 Of course, Wallace’s primary interest in the Prolegomena is ultimately Hegel, but Schelling is given more of a hearing in these pages than anywhere else in the published works of the British idealists. Wallace confesses that ‘an involuntary touch of sadness falls upon the historian as he surveys Schelling’s career’ (1894: 137) and sees this remarkable thinker ‘lapse into a mere episode’ (1894: 138). He speculates on a number of reasons for this fall from prominence: Schelling’s seemingly capricious shifting between systems, his fascination with scientific developments that tended ‘to fasten too greedily on the miraculous and night-side of nature’, the suspicion that he was ‘a crypto-catholic’ (1894: 138), and he even suggests the influence of his wife Caroline, whose own prodigious intellect Wallace hypothesises might have caused resentment and jealousy (1894: 139). But ultimately, Schelling’s failures were down to ‘a certain excess of objectivity’ according to Wallace: Schelling stood […] apart - animated by an immense curiosity, a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but withal he seemed not to have his heart deeply set and pledged to a distinctively human interest. (1894: 139)

And in perhaps something of a subtle rebuke to the aestheticism of his one-time colleague, Walter Pater, a figure whose Oxford career was

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bounded up with his own reading of Schelling and Hegel, Wallace characterises Schelling’s treatment of life as nothing more than ‘an instrument towards a great end - and that end a godlike, even if you like a religious, Epicurean life’ (1894: 139).8

Notes 1. On Scott, see Newell (1983). 2. Papers related to Adamson’s appointment are held at the archives of the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. Alexander Campbell Fraser, in his testimonial in his favour, speaks of Adamson as being ‘familiar to an uncommon degree with the later philosophical literature of Germany’. Lotze’s letter in favour of Sully seems to have been lost, but it is recorded as having been submitted, alongside another testimonial written by Alexander Bain. See GB 133 OCA/19/10, held at JRUL, Manchester. 3. Grote would later, this time successfully, block Martineau’s appointment to Hoppus’ chair on the same grounds when he eventually vacated it in 1866. 4. Interestingly, it is the context of discussing Mill that John Grote makes his most revealing comments on Schelling. For Grote, Mill’s attack on Hamilton was not so much an attack on his Scottish philosophy, but on the German philosophers who he so hated. The Examination was an expression of Mill’s ‘dread of Schelling’ (1865: 190). 5. For a detailed attempt to situate John Grote’s thought and development within the context of British intellectual responses to German idealism, see Gibbins (2007). 6.  I have consulted Green’s manuscripts, held at the archives at Balliol, and references to Schelling are very rare. As an undergraduate, Green’s notebooks show the influence of Müller on ‘The relation of language to mythology’, but as a mature academic this interest seems to dry up. His manuscripts contain a number of sets of lectures on Kant and while Green’s translations from the German are extensive, including extended translations of Hegel’s Philosophische Propädeutik (1840), Hermann Ulrici’s (1806–1888) Gott und der Mensch (1873), Baur’s Geschichte der christlichen Kirche (1853–1863), and more limited translations from Hegel’s Philosophie der Religion (1832), there are no translations from Schelling nor any real evidence of any first-hand acquaintance or deep engagement with his thought. See TH Green 2b.01, 2b.06, 2b.07, 2b.08, 2b.10, 4a.20, 4a.21, held at Balliol College Archives, Oxford. 7. See also Wallace (1882: 95–96). In the Prolegomena, Wallace compares Schelling not only with Darwin but also with Spencer (1894: 153). For Wallace, evolutionary theory is not sufficiently Schellingean, forgetting

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that both ‘the organic and inorganic, ordinarily so called, are both in a wider sense organic’. Darwinism ‘wants the courage of recognising its own tacit presuppositions’ (1894: 154–155). 8. While Wallace does not name the leading figure of Oxford aestheticism either here in the Prolegomena, or when addressing critically what he calls ‘Modern Hedonism’ in his book on Epicureanism (1880: 269–270), it is surely Pater that he has in mind. By the time that the revised Prolegomena was published, Pater had published Marius the Epicurean (1885) and republished his Renaissance in a third edition (1888), reintroducing his infamous ‘hedonistic’ conclusion. As undergraduates, both Wallace and Pater were members of the Old Mortality Society (discussed in the next chapter), and where it seems likely that Pater would have spoken about Schelling.

Works Cited Anon. 1828. Literary and Miscellaneous Intelligence. Monthly Review [s.3] 7: 278–231. ———. 1852. Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University of Oxford. London: W. Clowes. Caird, Edward. 1889. The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 2 vols. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons. ———. 1892. Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 2 vols. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons. Carlyle, Thomas. 1987. Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry Sweeney and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curthoys, M.C. 1997. The ‘Unreformed’ Colleges. In The History of the University of Oxford, 7 vols., ed. M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys, 6.1, 146–173. Oxford: Clarendon. Ense, Karl August Varnhagen von. 1862. Tagebücher: Dritter Band. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus. Gibbons, John R. 2007. John Grote, Cambridge University, and the Development of Victorian Thought. Exeter: Andrews. Green, T.H. 1883. Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A.C. Bradley. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grote, H.L. 1872. Posthumous Papers. London: William Clowes. ———. 1873. The Personal Life of George Grote. London: John Murray. Grote, George. 1865. Plato, and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3 vols. London: John Murray. Grote, John. 1865. Exploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Science, Part I. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co.

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Hicks, G. Dawes. 1928. A Century of Philosophy at University College, London. Journal of Philosophical Studies 3 (12): 468–482. Hoppus, John. 1836. The Continent in 1835, 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley. ———. 1847. The Crisis of Popular Education. London: John Snow. Jowett, Benjamin, and A.P. Stanley. 1848. Suggestions for an Improvement of the Examination Statute. Oxford: Francis Macpherson. Mansel, H.L. 2018. Phrontisterion, ed. Giles Whiteley. Victorian Literature and Culture 46 (2): 485–514. Martineau, James. 1891. Essays, Reviews and Addresses, 3 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Masson, David. 1867. Recent British Philosophy, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Mill, William Hodge. 1840. Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the Gospel. Cambridge: J. & J.J. Deighton. Newell, J.P. 1983. A Nestor of Nonconformist Heretics: A.J. Scott (1805– 1866). The Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society 3: 16–24. Nichols, Thomas [Anon.]. 1876. Catalogue of the Library of the University of London. London: Taylor and Francis. Pusey, Edward Bouverie. 1854. Collegiate and Professorial Teaching and Discipline. London: John Henry Parker. Ritcher, Melvin. 1964. The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and His Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London: Macmillan. Scott, A.J. 1849. Suggestions on Female Education. London: Taylor, Walton & Maberly. ———. 1852. Introductory Lectures on the Opening of Owen’s College, Manchester, 2nd ed. London: Longmans et al. Schelling, F.W.J. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Sedgwick, Adam. 1850. A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 5th ed. London: John Parker. Stirling, James Hutchison. 1865. The Secret of Hegel, 2 vols. London: Longmans et al. Vaughan, Henry Halford. 1854. Oxford Reform and Oxford Professors. London: John Parker. Veitch, John. 1889. Knowing and Being. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

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Wallace, William. 1880. Epicureanism. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1882. Kant. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. ———. 1894. Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1898. Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics, ed. Edward Caird. Oxford: Clarendon. Watson, John. 1882. Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism: A Critical Exposition. Chicago: S.C. Griggs. Whewell, William. 1837. On the Principles of English University Education. London: John Parker. Willis, Kirk. 1988. The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830–1900. Victorian Studies 32: 85–111.

CHAPTER 10

Schelling in British Mythological and Aesthetic Literature

Schelling’s interest in myth developed early. His first published work was the essay ‘Über Mythen’, published when he was just eighteen years old in Paulus’ Memorabilien in 1793. It was this work that occasioned the first published naming of Schelling in English in a review in the British Critic (Anon. 1794). That review, to recall, had also noted Schelling’s dissertation, which focused on a reading of the fall of man in Genesis III and associated the figure of Eve with the myth of Pandora. From this point onwards, Schelling’s interest in mythology was keen, and caught up in revolutionary fervour, he announced that we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Until we make the ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they are of no interest to the people […]. Mythology must become philosophical, to make the people rational, and philosophy must become mythological, to make philosophy sensual. (Hölderlin 2003: 186–187)1

This idea would later be developed in the System in a passage in which Schelling described how the intellektuelle Anschauung of the philosopher became accessible to the ordinary person in an ästhetische Anschauung [aesthetic intuition]. ‘Art is the only true organ and document of philosophy’ (SW I.3, 628; HKA I.9, 327; 1978: 231), Schelling argues, and given that ‘philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge’, it is easy to see ‘what the medium for this return © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_10

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of science to poetry will be; for in mythology such a medium existed, before the occurrence of a breach now seemingly beyond repair’. What Schelling wanted was for ‘a new mythology […] to arise, which shall be the creation not of some single individual author, but of a new race, personifying, as it were, one single poet’ (SW I.3, 629–630; HKA I.9, 329; 1978: 232–233).

Mythology, Allegory, Tautography During the Romantic period, British responses to Schelling’s philosophy of mythology were less frequent than those dealing with his Naturphilosophie. After the initial notice of ‘Über Mythen’, the first published discussion of Schelling on mythology—or, indeed, of any aspect of Schelling’s positive philosophy—appeared in the Classical Review in 1816. Reviewing Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1815), the author, signing themselves ‘F’, considers Schelling’s treatise full of ‘very important matter’, both philologically and philosophically. ‘F’ opens the review broadly sympathetic to Schelling, arguing that some of his most striking philosophical hypotheses, ‘that the uncertainty of etymological explications of the names of deities arises from the multiplicity of the attributes of each deity’, should be treated as ‘reasonable rules’ (1816: 60). But as the review continues, it becomes clear that some of the conclusions Schelling had drawn from these rules, along with the evidence he had marshalled, were deemed more problematic. The reviewer was particularly concerned with Schelling’s discussion of monotheism, holding that the ‘idea of an empty Monotheism, allowing to God but one separate personality, or one single power, is as strange to the Old and the New Testament, as it is repugnant to all antiquity, and to the unanimous sense of ages’ (1816: 63). But in spite of these misgivings, the review concluded on a more positive note, saying that one ‘cannot but admire’ Schelling’s ‘high scientific merit’: Every thing that appears sublime in the works of art of ancient Greece, every thing that is agreeable to the laws of matter and of spirit, every thing that is divine in the revelations of the Jews and in their accomplishment in Christianity, is brought into a beautiful system of harmony by the author, who by a series of philosophical treatises of the highest importance has prepared a work, which, being at the same time philological and historical,

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seem to be corroborated by the best theories of every age. To that great work the present treatise is only an introduction. (1816: 63)

The last allusion to ‘that great work’ is to the Weltalter, and constitutes the first such allusion to Schelling’s great unfinished essay in British literature. One person who was struck by Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake was Coleridge. It seems likely that he read the essay in the first half of 1817 (Coleridge 1998: 463), because Coleridge asks in his letter to his London book-dealer Thomas Boosey in June of that year for a copy of ‘Schelling’s “Welt-altern”, if it be published’ (1959: 738). In May 1825, he delivered a lecture ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ to the Royal Society of Literature, published in 1834. Wellek has said that this lecture ‘paraphrases Schelling’, but in fact, as the editors for Coleridge’s Collected Works make clear, ‘it suggests like-mindedness rather than dependence’ (1995: 1255). In the lecture, Coleridge borrows Schelling’s emphasis that the groundless ground which precedes the formation of the world as such (the subject of the Weltalter), that which distinguishes ‘potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualised’, could be conceived of as a kind of ‘longing’, ‘the Esurience, the πόθος, or desiderium’ (1995: 1269). Moreover, Coleridge’s whole argument in the lecture is indebted to Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. In his earliest essay ‘Über Mythen’, which Coleridge had read by this point (Shaffer 1975: 135), Schelling had argued that mythological figures must be understood simultaneously as philosophemes manifested in the real in the world, and ones which referred back to nothing other than themselves. For Coleridge, myth has been misunderstood as being ‘poetic’, as alluding to events as though they were fictive, or as though they were allegorical, signifying something other than themselves. This is in part a historical error, Coleridge maintains, since mythology dates from a time ‘long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry’: ‘In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy, the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a philosopheme and ταυτηγοριχὸν[.]’ (1995: 1267–1268). It is for this final Greek neologism that Coleridge’s lecture is best remembered today, and Schelling himself borrowed Coleridge’s coinage ‘tautegory’ in his late lectures on mythology. ‘Mythology is not allegorical; it is tautegorical’, Schelling writes: ‘To mythology, the gods

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are actually existing essences, gods that are not something else, do not mean something else, but rather mean only what they are’ (SW II.1, 196; 2007: 136). Coleridge’s coinage had been meant to distinguish tautegory from allegory, and in Aids to Reflection, published the year he delivered the lecture on Aeschylus, he made explicit the distinction: ‘tautegorical (i.e. expressing the same subject but with a difference) [must be understood] in contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, that are always allegorical (i.e. expressing a different subject but with a resemblance)’ (1993: 206).2 In the twentieth century, allegory has tended to be privileged over the symbol. For critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, symbolism suggests a direct relationship between signifier and signified, whereas in allegory, the relationship is arbitrary; as such, the allegorical mode is one of catachresis, a perpetual misnaming. If mythology were allegorical, then the gods would indeed ‘mean something else’, but Coleridge and Schelling argue that this is not the case. The point is significant, getting to the heart of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. As he argued in his later lectures on Philosophie der Mythologie in Berlin, Mythology is not something that emerged artificially, but is rather something that emerged naturally […] – form and content, matter and outer appearance, cannot be differentiated in it. The ideas are not first present in another form, but rather emerge only in, and thus also only at the same time with, this form. (SW II.1: 195; 2007: 136)

Coleridge makes the point in one of his notebook entries, based partly on his reading of Creuzer, in which he announces that tautegory is ‘the consummate Symbol’ (1989: #4832). Myth is not to be taken allegor­ ically or figuratively, but literally. As Schelling puts it, mythology ‘does not simply exist in ideas’ (SW II.1: 247; 2007: 171). Coleridge’s idea of tautegory, then, gets to the heart of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. As Schelling writes in his Philosophie der Mythologie, ‘it was remarkable to me that it was only outside of Germany that a man was found who understood deeply and almost felt the significance’ of his philosophy of mythology: ‘that deep man was the aforementioned Coleridge’ (SW II.1, 294). And somewhat earlier in the text, in a footnote appended to his use of the word ‘tautegorisch’, Schelling acknowledges the power of Coleridge’s coinage, in another passage generous in its praise:

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I borrow the expression from the well known Coleridge, the first of his fellow countrymen who has understood and meaningfully used German poetry and science, especially philosophy. [Coleridge’s] essay has particularly pleased me because it showed me how one of my earlier writings […] – whose philosophical content and importance was little, or rather, not at all, understood in Germany – has been understood in its meaning by the talented Brit. For the apposite expression mentioned, I happily let him have the borrowings from my writings, [those] sharply, all too sharply, criticized by his fellow countrymen […]. One should not charge that to such a truly congenial man. (SW II.1, 196; 2007: 187)

As Paul Hamilton has noted, this footnote is like a counterpoint to the claim of ‘coincidence’ in the Biographia Literaria, since in it, Schelling claims that reading Coleridge is uncanny, the experience being ‘very like reading one of his own earlier works’ (2007: 105). Significantly, Schelling absolves Coleridge of blame for the charges of plagiarism, and we have seen already how he would weigh in on the plagiarism controversy in private from Berlin. But more than this, the passage amounts to a recognition on his part that ‘Coleridge had something to contribute to Schelling’s own arguments’ (Hamilton 2007: 105). Schelling is particularly taken with Coleridge’s style, calling ‘the essay singular on account of the language’ through which he sought to give ‘unhesitatingly to his fellow countrymen unfamiliar with it […] expressions to be enjoyed, like subject-object’ (SW II.1: 196; 2007: 187), another uncanny operation, since it is experienced by Schelling as reading his thoughts in the language of another. But there is also the acknowledgment of a difference, for ‘Coleridge uses the word tautegorical as synonymous with philosophem, which would admittedly not fit my meaning, but perhaps he means to say mythology must likewise properly be taken just as one usually takes a philosphem’ (SW II.1: 196; 2007: 187). Schelling, in other words, recognises the theistic undercurrent to Coleridge’s use of the word, and, as we saw in earlier chapters, it was on just such a point that Coleridge ultimately felt it necessary to distance his own thought from Schelling’s.3 All these kinds of tautegorical claims proved too much for some of Schelling’s post-Romantic British readers, and during the 1830s, interest in his philosophy of mythology waned. British auditors in Munich during the period tended to be struck most by Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, and perhaps the only important post-Romantic thinker to address Schelling’s work on mythology during this decade

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was Thomas Keightley (1789–1872). Little is known of Keightley’s life: he was born in Newtown, Ireland, and studied at Trinity, Dublin, before he moved to London to work as a journalist, author and editor. His early work on folklore, The Fairy Mythology (1828), was read in Germany and praised by Jakob Grimm, and he wrote extensively on mythology. In 1831, he published his Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, which linked ancient mythology with later folk-legends, and in this work, Keightley was methodologically close to Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840). Müller’s historical approach to the ‘science’ of mythology was not in keeping with Schelling’s more intuitive approach, although he could not avoid admitting on occasion that the philosopher had come to ‘ingenious’ and valuable insights (1828: 2: 82–83).4 Keightley, for his part, thought Schelling’s speculations on mythology were ‘theological’ insofar as it ‘assigns mythology a higher rank; regarding it as the theology of polytheistic religions, and seeking to reduce it to harmony with the original monotheism of mankind’: [In] assigning a common source to the systems of India, Egypt, Greece, and other countries, and regarding the East as the original birthplace of mythology, [Schelling] employ[s] [himself] in tracing the imagined channels of communication; and as they esteem every legend, ceremony, usage, vessel, and implement to have been symbolical, they seek to discover what truth, moral, religious, or philosophical lies hid beneath its cover. These men are justly denominated Mystics. (1838: 12)

In a set of footnotes, Keightley first makes an anti-Catholic jibe (a common misconception regarding Schelling’s religion, as we saw in Chapter 7), before employing the standard post-Romantic rhetorical move of associating this kind of mysticism with mania. He advises any readers unfortunate enough to have opened up a page of Schelling ‘to read as a sure antidote the Antisymbolik of Voss’ (1838: 13).5 For Keightley, Schelling’s mythology is simply speculation upon mythological themes: Their whole science is founded on accidental resemblances of names and practices, their ideas are conveyed in a highly coloured figurative style, and a certain vague magnificence appears to envelope their conceptions, – all calculated to impose on the ignorant and the unwary. (1838: 12)

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Schelling’s philosophy of mythology was a linguistic sleight of hand played upon the readers, Keightley contends, an unscrupulous attempt to hoodwink them. The stakes were high: reading Schelling could ‘hardly fail to injure the intellectual powers, and to produce an indifference toward true religion’ (1838: 12).

Comparative Mythology: Max Müller If the early Victorian mythologists were not widely influenced by Schelling’s philosophy of mythology, deeming it too ‘Romantic’ to be taken seriously as a science, the discipline of mythological studies was soon to be revitalised and modernised by a figure very much indebted to his theories: Friedrich Max Müller. Born in Dessau, the only son of the poet and Orientalist Wilhelm (1794–1827), Müller entered the University of Leipzig in 1841, where he studied under Lotze and Hermann Brockhaus (1806–1877), Professor of Sanskrit, who lectured on the Rigveda. After completing his doctorate, Müller travelled to Berlin in March 1844, a trip which arose partly ‘from a desire to make the acquaintance of Schelling’: My inclination towards philosophy had become stronger and stronger; I had my own ideas about the mythological as a necessary form of ancient philosophy, and when I saw that the old philosopher had advertised his lectures […] on mythology, I could not resist, and went to Berlin in 1844. (1901: 152)

Müller recounted his first visit to the philosopher’s home to pay his Honorarium in a letter to his mother: I spoke to him of my time in Leipzig, of [Christian Samuel] Weiss [17801856] and Brockhaus, and then we came to Indian Philosophy. Here he allowed me to tell him a good deal. I especially dwelt on the likeness between Sankhya and his own system, and remarked how an inclination to the Vedânta showed itself. He asked what we must understand by Vedânta, how the existence of God was proved, how God created the world, whether it had reality […]. He seemed to wish to learn more, as he asked if I could explain a text. (1902: 1: 23)

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From the outset, Schelling appears to have recognised something special in the young Müller, and the meeting became a dialogue where the student seems to have held his own. In the same letter (1902: 1: 23), Müller recalls that Schelling had been ‘much occupied’ with his recent reading of Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), presumably referring to his Miscellaneous Essays (1837) which focused on Hindu religion and Indian mythology. Alongside Schelling’s interest in William Jones (1746–1794) (SW II.1, 88–89; 2007: 64–65), the fact that he was occupied with Colebrooke shows once again the ways in which Schelling was assimilating thought from British scholars and the fact that the networks of reception between Schelling and Britain were not simply unidirectional. Müller began to attend Schelling’s lectures, ‘from which my purse suffers’ (1902: 1: 24), sporadically at first, but, by late June, ‘more diligently and with great interest’, noting that ‘his philosophy has something Oriental about it. I am translating the Kathâka Upanishad for him with great diligence’ (1902: 1: 25; see also 1901: 471).6 These recollections show little anticipation of the ways in which Müller would later break with Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. However, reflecting back over forty years later, with a lifetime’s work on comparative mythology behind him, Müller’s memory of the same period was less laudatory: He was at that time an old man, more of a poet and a prophet than a philosopher; and his lectures on the philosophy of mythology and religion opened many new views to my mind. But, though I admired the depth and range of his ideas, I could not help being struck by what seemed to me his unfounded statements with regard to the ancient religions of the East. (1888: 18)

It is difficult to square this later scepticism with the younger man’s voice, but what is clear is the ways in which Schelling’s name continued to be an important one during the next few years of Müller’s career. While in Berlin, Müller had befriended Alexander von Humboldt, who had in turn told Bunsen, then Prussian Minister in London, of the young scholar. In a letter of 27 November 1844, Bunsen wrote to Julius Hare to see if he could arrange for work for Müller as a tutor in England: ‘I have received from a highly respected quarter a very strong recommendation of a young man […], much thought of by Schelling’ (1902: 1: 28–29). Bunsen clearly deemed the name of the philosopher

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to be the key to gaining Hare’s favour. But while Hare came through, Müller decided against the trip, travelling to Paris in spring 1845, where he met the Orientalist Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852), who encouraged him to translate the Rigveda. He eventually made it to England in June 1846, where he examined manuscripts held in London at the library of the East India Company. He met Bunsen in person, and it was he who convinced Oxford University Press to publish Müller’s translation of the Rigveda from 1849 onwards. Müller stayed on in Oxford to supervise the process, where he became firm friends with figures such as Hare, Stanley and Jowett, and was made Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages in 1851, before being appointed Oxford’s first Professor of Comparative Philology in 1866. We have already seen in Chapter 5 the ways in which Bunsen was instrumental in Schelling’s appointment at Berlin and played a key part of the Anglo-Germanic networks that received his philosophy in Britain, and in Bunsen, Müller found another figure interested in both mythology and in Schelling as a mythologist. Bunsen’s interest in Schelling’s philosophy of mythology was longstanding, but he seemed to consider the subject matter to have been a burden on the philosopher. In 1835, he wrote a letter to Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855) about having passed satisfactory days with Schelling: might his great work soon come out! and above all, the wholly speculative part. I wish that all mythology had rather been sunk in Lethe, than that this great thinker had suffered the best years of his life to be swallowed up in that abyss: it surely never was his calling to enter into such detail, although the ruling ideas in mythology are better recognised and stated by him than anyone else. (1868: 1: 413)

Writing to Thomas Arnold three years later, Bunsen acknowledged how deeply into Schelling he was during this period in Munich: I have studied here that really stupendous effort of human genius, the system of Schelling, in two of his courses of lectures […] which together embrace all questions and problems, not of men, but of the work of God in men. (1868: 1: 646)

In another letter to August Kestner (1777–1853) dated 11 June 1838, Bunsen relates happening upon ‘a copy (which I was able to purchase) of

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notes taken during Schelling’s lectures’, which seems to have sharpened his own thoughts: I was so seized upon by the giant conception, that I resolve to take time by the forelock, and in this place at once to sound its depths, as far as I should have power to do so. […] Much diversity of opinion arises, which I discuss with Schelling, but quite independently of the fundamental principle of this admirable work. (1868: 1: 462–463)

It was during this period that Bunsen was at work on his so-called ‘Ægyptiaca’, published in 1844 as Ägyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, and translated into English in 1848. Bunsen discussed the text with Schelling (1868: 1: 460), pointing out disagreements over their respective approaches to the subject, some of which made it into the final volume, published in 1857 (translated into English in 1867). There, Bunsen objected to some of Schelling’s philological speculations (1867: 230), although he also spoke enthusiastically of his attempt to show that the development of the history of mythology was subject to organic laws (1867: 61–62). It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that Bunsen’s own philosophy of mythology had been formed by his reading of the Methode in 1811–1813 (1867: 309). Nevertheless, Bunsen acknowledges that while ‘I cannot agree with the method’ of the later philosophy of mythology, those ‘great thoughts […] prompted me to many farther researches, so that I feel myself deeply indebted to the man whose name and portrait form the frontispiece of this volume’ (1867: 309). The reference is to an engraving of Schelling’s head in profile, flanked by the god Thoth to his left and goddess Seshat to his right. The volume itself was dedicated to Schelling in the form a lengthy poem, dated 1 July 1854, twelve days after the philosopher’s death. Read today, the poem seems like an un-ironic version of Mansel’s pastiche of Schelling in his Phrontisterion, published two years beforehand. We know that Schelling kept up with Müller’s career from afar, if only through Bunsen. In late 1853, he had passed on a manuscript of some of Müller’s German translations of the Rigveda to Schelling (1870: 3: 453), although Müller himself recalls that ‘Schelling seemed quite disappointed’ by them (1901: 188). But Müller’s own contributions to comparative mythology show clearly his debts to Schelling, if also his attempts to maintain his distance from him. Müller praised Schelling for

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his intuitive understanding of the centrality of mythology to philosophy, writing in 1871 that the stream of modern philosophic thought has ended where ancient philosophy began - in a Philosophy of Mythology, which […] forms the most important part of Schelling’s final system, of what he called himself his Positive Philosophy. (2002: 146)

But such intuitions were precisely that for Müller—intuitions, and he expressed the hope ‘that philosophers who speculate on the origin of religion […] will in future write more circumspectly, and with less […] dogmatic assurance’ (1872: 102). Even when speculation happened upon truth, such intuition could not mask the lack of science in Schelling’s method, and Müller was particularly critical of his tendency to generalise, writing in 1898: Philosophers take the place of historians, and undertake to account for the origin, not of such and such a religion, but of religion in general, and even to explain the laws which, they suppose, governed its development. The history of religions was thus supplanted by the history of religion; only it was difficult to say where that religion in general was to be found. (2002: 354–355)

And while Müller had been an enthusiastic auditor in Berlin, when these lectures were eventually published, he came to be brutally honest about the failings of Schelling’s later philosophy of mythology. In his essay on ‘Greek Mythology’ (1858), Müller exclaims: On Schelling’s ‘Philosophy of Mythology’, […] we hardly dare to pronounce an opinion. And yet, with all due respect for his great name, with a sincere appreciation of some deep thoughts on the subject of mythology too, […] we must say, as critics, that his facts and theories defy all rules of sound scholarship, and that his language is so diffuse and vague, as to be unworthy of the century we live in. To one who knows how powerful and important an influence Schelling’s mind exercised on Germany at the beginning of this century, it is hard to say this. But if we could not read his posthumous volumes without sadness, and without a strong feeling of the mortality of all human knowledge, we cannot mention them, when they must be mentioned, without expressing our conviction that though they

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are interesting on account of their author, they are disappointing in every other respect. (1870: 2: 144)

Müller’s strong repudiation of Schelling’s writings as being ‘unworthy of the century we live in’ picks up both on the common post-Romantic critique of his work as mystical, but also attests in part to the remarkable speed of progress that characterised the Victorian age: Müller’s critique dates from 1858, hardly the fin de siècle. Nevertheless, Müller’s mature contributions to the discipline of comparative mythology were more deeply indebted to Schelling than he might have always liked to admit. One of the most famous examples of this kind of borrowing is Müller’s theory of henotheism. In ‘Semetic Monotheism’ (1860), Müller argued that there were ‘various kinds of monotheism’ (2002: 29). Alongside monotheism proper, defined as the belief in the existence of a single god, Müller argued that there was henotheism, ‘the faith in a single God’ (2002: 31) at the expense of other possible gods: There are in realty two kinds of oneness which, when we enter into metaphysical discussions, must be carefully distinguished, and which for practical purposes are well kept separate by the definite and indefinite articles. There is one kind of oneness which does not exclude the idea of plurality; there is another that does. When we say that Cromwell was a Protector of England, we do not assert that he was the only protector. But if we say that he was the Protector of England, it is understood that he was the only man who enjoyed the title. (2002: 30–31)

Müller’s idea is based on Schelling’s argument that a ‘relative monotheism’ precedes the development of polytheistic system, which in turn precedes the development of an ‘absolute monotheism’ (SW II.1, 128; 2007: 91). But it was Müller who popularised the idea of henotheism, one which was widely used by scholars of comparative mythology and religion for the rest of the century.7 Yet the formative importance of Schelling to Müller’s mature vision of comparative mythology was not limited to specific borrowings. There were three other ways in which Müller owed a debt to Schelling: in his basic understanding of myth as an attempt to ‘translat[e] the phenomenon of nature into thought’ (1897: 1: x); in his understanding of the way in which mythology is an expression of language; and in his

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understanding that the nation was formed at the moment when language and mythology gave a people a sense of identity. The first of these ideas is one which Schelling had maintained since his first piece ‘Über Mythen’, which argued that myth originated from an oral culture that translated bodily signs to communicate its message, and served a social function of bring people together (Williamson 2004: 43–44; 2013: 248). Anticipating Derrida, Schelling argued that it was the establishment of writing that undercut myth, both socially and as a privileged mode of communication. Müller relies on to a similar argument when discussing Schelling’s philosophy of language and linking the development of language to the development of mythology. Noting his upbringing in ‘an intellectual atmosphere permeated by the ideas of development and historical growth’ (1887: 92), Müller found the theory of ‘evolution’ applicable to language, although he also notes ‘the dangers of that theory’ (93). Nevertheless, to argue his point, he often had cause to cite Schelling. In spite of his professed dislike of the Philosophie der Mythologie, Müller consistently returned to this text, and he was fond of a passage from the second lecture in which Schelling argued that: Without language, it is impossible to conceive philosophical, nay, even human consciousness; and hence the foundations of language could not have been laid consciously. Nevertheless, the more we analyse language, the more clearly we see that it transcends in depth the most conscious productions of the mind. It is with language as with all organic beings; we imagine they spring into being blindly, and yet we cannot deny the intentional wisdom in the formation of every one of them. (1871: 2: 77, Müller’s translation; SW II.1, 52; 2007: 40)8

Müller’s interest here is less on the idea of the unconscious Ungrund itself, than on language’s formative power to shape human consciousness. For both Schelling and Müller, language seeks to express the ineffable which lies at the limit of man’s sovereignty. The further back in time one looked, ‘the more helpless also shall we find human language in its endeavours to express what of all things was most difficult to express. The history of religion is in one sense a history of language’ (1864: 467). The development of language goes hand-in hand with the development of mythology, and together they lead to the establishing of a nation, and on two separate occasions in his lectures of 1861 and 1863, Müller directs his readers to the fifth lecture of Schelling’s Philosophie der

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Mythologie which gives an insight into ‘the life of language in a state of nature’ (1871: 1: 62; 2: 34–35). For Schelling, ‘language […] only has meaning as something communal’ (SW II.1, 114; 2007: 83), and this idea was another one which Müller adopted at the basis of his understanding of comparative mythology: It was Schelling […] who first asked the question, What makes an ethnos? […] And the answer which he gave, though it sounded startling to me when, in 1845, I listened, at Berlin, to the lectures of the old philosopher, has been confirmed more and more by subsequent researches into the history of language and religion. (1872: 55)9

‘It is language and religion that make a people’ (1872: 56), Müller answers, following Schelling, and he quotes a passage from earlier in the fifth lecture by way of evidence: ‘A people exists only when it has determined itself with regard to its mythology. […] The same applies to the language of a people; it becomes definite at the same time that a people becomes definite’ (1872: 57, Müller’s translation; SW II.1, 110; 2007: 79). Mythology is formative: it allows the nation to be established, as that which conditions the nation. It was perhaps partly in this context that Müller decided to wade into contemporary British debates over Homer. Schelling had famously argued that ‘Homer is not the father [erzeugt] of Mythology but Mythology the father [Erzeugniß] of Homer’ (SW II.2, 649), and Müller pointed out the importance of this view, one which helped to lift ‘the curtain which […] divided the Homeric present from the Homeric past’ (1872: 1: 111). Elsewhere, Müller writes: ‘The religious instinct’, as Schelling says, ‘should be honoured even in dark and confused mysteries.’ We must only guard against a temptation to which an eminent writer and statesman of this country has sometimes yielded in his work on Homer, we must not attempt to find Christian ideas - ideas peculiar to Christianity - in the primitive faith of mankind. (1872: 2: 466)

The reference was to William Ewart Gladstone’s Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858), which claimed that Homer and the Greeks had access to the same divine logos as prophesied in the New Testament.

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The appeal to Schelling here is to an authority who has been misunderstood. To Müller, Gladstone’s scholarship was too ‘enthusiastic’, one which failed to pay sufficient attention to the historical facts which comparative mythology could lay bare. It was a silent rebuke of Gladstone, a man whom Müller considered a friend.10

The New Mythology: Aesthetics and Aestheticism In early 1849, Benjamin Jowett had read the Akademierede and recommended it to Francis Turner Palgrave: [Schelling] shows a mind ‘sensitive to every breath’ of beauty, and combining with this the highest metaphysical power. I should think Schelling was the only one of the German Philosophers who had any true feeling for art. (Abbott and Campbell 1897: 1: 162)

While there is no evidence that Palgrave took this advice, Jowett’s comments are significant since they speak to the ways in which he might have introduced other undergraduates to his aesthetics. One such undergraduate was likely Walter Pater, who Jowett took on as a private student when he was studying at Queen’s College, Oxford. Pater would go on to become the leading voice in the British aesthetic movement in the 1870s and 1880s. For Schelling, the philosophy of mythology was intertwined throughout his career with aesthetics. As we saw in Chapter 2, interest in Schelling and aesthetics was a key element in the Romanticism of Crabb Robinson and of Coleridge, and it was a topic which would be galvanised in the mid-century by the publication of Johnson’s English translation of Schelling’s Akademierede in 1845, discussed in Chapter 6. But it was in the aestheticism movement and in late nineteenth-century British idealist aesthetics that some of the most nuanced comments on Schelling’s philosophy of art are to be found. Indeed, in one sense, Schelling clearly anticipated what would become known as the aestheticism movement. It is one of the curiosities of Crabb Robinson’s time in Jena that the 1804 lecture he gave to Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant ‘On the German Aesthetick’ occasioned the first ever recorded use of the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’, one which would become the motto of aestheticism after Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) used the phrase

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independently in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). In his diary, Constant wrote: dinner with Robinson, disciple of Schelling. […] very ingenious ideas. art for art’s sake, and without purpose [l’art pour l’art, et sans but]; every purpose denatures art: but art achieves a purpose it did not even possess. (2002: 68–69)

Indeed, as James Vigus notes, ‘since the group spoke French together, it is even possible that Robinson himself was the first to invent this phrase’ (Robinson 2010: 22). Given this emphasis on aesthetic autonomy in Schelling, it is hardly surprising to find that Pater became keenly interested in Schelling’s aesthetics. As the figure head for the art for art’s sake movement in Britain, Pater was always likely predisposed to be receptive to a thinker who maintained that art was the only proper ‘organon’ of truth. And he was likely to have been particularly drawn to a key figure of German aesthetic theory who refused to subordinate the aesthetic to philosophy, as Hegel had done. Pater had learnt German in the summer of 1862 specifically in order to read Hegel, but in his early years at least, he seems to have been as interested in Schelling as in his one-time roommate. In his biography, Thomas Wright recalls that Pater’s election to a Fellowship at Brasenose in 1864 was ‘thanks chiefly […] to his knowledge of German Philosophy, and especially the systems of Schelling and Hegel’ (1907: 1: 211). Yet while research into Pater’s reading habits during the 1860s and 1870s demonstrated clearly that Pater was reading Hegel, no clear evidence emerged of which of Schelling’s texts Pater had definitively read (Inman 1981, 1990). Likewise, while references to Hegel by name are frequent in Pater’s published and unpublished works, open references to Schelling are less common. On the basis of this evidence, critics have established Pater as one of the most perceptive readers of Hegelian thought in nineteenth-century Anglophone culture, but have rarely estimated the role Schelling played in his aestheticism.11 That only one of Pater’s critics to date has devoted significant attention to his reading of Schelling tells its own tale. For F. C. McGrath, Pater’s attitude toward Schelling was both consistently antipathetic and ‘confused’ (1986: 89). He makes the first claim on the basis of only three substantial passages in which he believes that Pater is engaging with Schelling, and the second apparently on the basis of no first hand

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reading of Schelling at all.12 Perhaps unsurprisingly, in this context, a closer examination of Pater’s works shows that McGrath was overhasty in dismissing Schelling’s influence, his head having perhaps been turned by the frosty reception the German philosopher was given in Pater’s essay on ‘Coleridge’. First published in The Westminster Review, January 1866,13 Pater argued in this early piece that ‘modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the “relative” spirit in place of the “absolute”’, one which was developed principally through the sciences which ‘reveal types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities’ (1910a: 66). He is thinking here of the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and his followers which had started a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of its life become more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature. Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refines itself into intellect. (1910a: 67)14

The phrasing suggests the ways in which Pater sees the Naturphilosophie as a moment towards the Freiheitsschrift. But in Coleridge’s case, Pater diagnoses his ‘ever restlessly scheming to “apprehend the absolute”’ as ‘an effort of sickly thought, that saddened his mind’ (1910a: 68–69), perhaps here referring to the theme of melancholia (Schwermut) in Schelling’s philosophy of nature. Coleridge had an ‘inborn taste’ for transcendental philosophy, chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling, [which] Coleridge applied with an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology, and poetic or artistic criticism. It is in his theory of poetry, of art, that he comes nearest to principles of permanent truth and importance: […] an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws of a universal logic. (1910a: 74)

The pronoun in Pater’s second sentence is ambiguous, so that the ‘permanent truth and importance’ of either Coleridge or Schelling or both may be characterised in this manner. Regardless, however, Schelling is

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clearly deemed a ‘mystic’ in these passages, one whose own ‘sickly’ philosophy led Coleridge astray. It is hardly surprising to find that Pater’s essay touches on the question of plagiarism, given the ways in which this was a key contention in Coleridge’s posthumous reputation during the nineteenth century, as we saw in Chapter 4: ‘There can be no plagiarism in philosophy’, says Heine:– Es gibt kein Plagiat in der Philosophie, in reference to the charge brought against Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far earlier origin than any of them. (1910a: 75)15

One assumes that Jowett had regaled Pater as a student with his recollections of his audience in Berlin, as he did with so many of his other undergraduates, telling the story of how the German philosopher had forcibly defended Coleridge, but what is curious here is that Pater avoids actually detailing the charge of his plagiarism of Schelling, although he could assume that most of his readers in 1866 would have picked up on the point. Instead, he speaks to the theme of continuity in the history of philosophy: Schellingism, the ‘Philosophy of Nature’, is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought: it embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. (1910a: 75)

In so doing, Pater seeks to rehabilitate an element of what he himself here calls Schelling’s ‘pantheism’. It was a bold move from the young Oxford don to risk so openly a breach with the establish Christian Church. But Pater was hardly wholly positive towards Schelling in this early piece, and an earlier surviving work may give us a sense of why. This was an essay unpublished during Pater’s lifetime titled ‘Diaphaneitè’, dated July 1864, which has been generally though to be a revised version of a paper which he had read at Oxford’s Old Mortality Society in February that year. Previous members of this Society had included Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), T. H. Green and Edward Caird, but

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Pater’s audience that day would have included current members John Addington Symonds and William Wallace. For Gerald Monsman, Pater’s model of his ‘aesthetic hero’ in this essay is modelled on Fichte (1971: 365–376), but he perhaps also had Schelling in mind when he discussed the diaphanous aesthetic critic. In phrasing that has often been discussed in queer theory (Dellamora 1990: 58–68), Pater’s model for the ‘disinterested’ aesthetic critic is one which is ‘sexless’: ‘Here there is a kind of moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own’ (253). Coming in a paper given within the walls of Oxford, the context suggests that Schelling’s attack on homosexual dons in the Methode may have lain somewhere at the back of Pater’s mind: Whatever cannot be incorporated into this active, living whole [the ideal university] is dead matter to be eliminated sooner or later - such is the law of all living organisms. The fact is, there are too many sexless [geschlechtslos] bees in the hive of the sciences, and since they cannot be productive, they merely keep reproducing their own spiritual barrenness in the form of inorganic excretions. (SW I.5: 217; 1966: 11)

Pater perhaps saw somewhere in Schelling’s philosophy a threat to his own sexual desire. Such a reticence would be understandable. After all, less than ten years later, Pater would ‘outed’ to the severe detriment of his future academic career.16 After 1873, Pater’s own work shows something of a shift towards a more conservative philosophical position, one which was particularly keen to stress the possibility of a rapprochement between his aestheticism and mainstream Victorian Christianity. Open allusions to Schelling are virtually non-existent in these later writings, but his influence is still felt, if only diffusely. Take Pater’s use of the English word ‘type’ which he favours predominately over other cognate terms, and which translates Schelling’s Urbild. When Pater writes that Greek sculpture ‘pass[es] on from age to age the type of what is pleasantest to look on, which, as type, is indeed eternal, it is, of course, but for an hour that it rests with any one of them individually’ (1910c: 296–297), he is clearly channelling Schelling, who in the Akademierede writes: ‘when the artist seizes the aspect and essence of the idea, and produces that, he forms the individual into a world in itself – a species, an eternal type’ (SW I.7, 304; 1845: 12).17 Likewise, the diffuse influence of Schelling’s philosophy

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of mythology is felt throughout Pater’s writings on mythology, as is that of Müller, who he had read closely (Inman 1981: 159–160; 1990: 123–126). The imaginary portrait ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), for instance, tests and probes the limits of Müller’s solar theory, informed no doubt by Pater’s friend and staunch critic of Müller, Andrew Lang (1844–1912). Likewise, through his reading of Müller, Pater gained a more nuanced understanding of the complicated ways in which one might effect some kind of ‘reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ’. ‘A modern scholar occupied by this problem’, Pater writes, ‘might observe that all religions may be regarded as natural products, that, at least in their origin, their growth, and decay, they have common laws’ (1980: 25). No ‘might’ about it, for the modern scholar Pater has in mind is Müller, in a passage in which he is clearly under Schelling’s sway.18 Likewise, Pater’s writings on ancient Greek mythology, beginning in earnest with his essays on ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ (1875) and ‘A Study of Dionysus’ (1876), show either a diffuse or direct engagement with Schelling’s ideas. While Billie Andrew Inman argues (1990: 133) that Pater’s vision of Dionysus as ‘the double god of nature’ (1910c: 42) came either from his reading of Ludwig Preller (1809–1861) or Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868), he might equally well have got the interest in the mild/wild god (Pater 1910c: 78–79) from Schelling, even if his classical source is in Plutarch, for he too is fascinated with ‘the mild one who was at once the wild one’ (SW II.3, 470). Likewise, Pater would have seen the ways in which Schelling treated Dionysus Iakchos (the third potency) as one who came to historical fulfilment in the figure of Christ, a motif which finds its way into his own writings, where Dionysus ‘comes before us as a tortured, persecuted, slain god – the suffering Dionysus’ (1910c: 51).19 And more broadly, Pater’s emphasis on the early historical links between poetry and mythology (1910e: 4, 6) may have been derived in part from his reading of Schelling (SW II.1, 20–21; 2007: 18–19). Nevertheless, what is clear is that Pater found Schelling as problem­ atic as he was fascinating, as seen, for instance, in Pater’s second novel, Gaston de Latour, left incomplete at his death and published posthumously in 1894. The plot of this historical romance sees the young Gaston lose his wife in Paris during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572). Some years later, well after the death of Charles IX (1574), he comes across Giordano Bruno lecturing in the St. Dominican chapel in the Sorbonne, presumably putting the action in 1581, when

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Bruno found himself exiled in Paris. The substance of this lecture is once again ‘pantheism’, and much of this chapter, titled ‘The Lower Pantheism’, had originally been published in a modified form as an essay on ‘Giordano Bruno’ in the Fortnightly Review, August 1889. Gaston hears Bruno ‘unfalteringly assert […] “the vision of all things in God” to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all enquiry into nature’ (1910b: 142). Pater’s treatment of Bruno here ghosts Schelling, who is never outright named, but who is always present. The ‘corollary’ of Bruno’s philosophy, Pater claims, was the famous axiom of “indifference”, of “the coincidence of contraries”. To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The differences of things […] would be lost in the length and breadth of the philosophic survey: nothing, in itself, being really either great or small; and matter certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but divine. (143)

Here, Pater’s quotation marks cite Schelling in silence, taking in his discussion of Indifferenz in the Bruno (SW I.4: 234–242; 1984: 130–142). But they do so in a manner which puns on the English term of ‘indifference’, bringing into play what the Germans call Gleichgültigkeit. This ironic doubling of the word is all the more poignant given the losses which Gaston, and indeed the whole French nation during the Wars of Religion, had had to endure: If God the Spirit had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be superficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and sorrow also, together with another distinction, always of emphatic reality to Gaston, for instance, to be added to the list of phenomena really “coincident”, or “indifferent”, as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they should? (1910b: 143–144)

The reference to freedom and necessity and good and evil brings into play the Freiheitsschrift, again, as does the allusion to joy and sorrow. A reader who knew the allusion to Schelling would be able to see Gaston’s distance from Bruno precisely through this experience of ‘sorrow’, and would be in the position to unpack the subtle passing allusion to ‘another distinction’. It turns Gaston into a melancholic, shrouded in

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that ‘veil of dejection’ (SW I.7 399; 2006: 62) which Schelling links to the passage of joy into sorrow and which he described as being the corollary of his own philosophy.20 Thus Pater’s sadness, a quality which today is sometimes forgotten in the standard narratives of British intellectual history. Instead, Pater is remembered for the aesthetic hedonism advocated in the conclusion to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) which defined aestheticism for a whole generation of young men, young men such as Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Pater’s one-time student at Oxford, who later reflected on the ‘strange influence’ the book had played in his life (2005: 102, 168). But if Pater’s late work such as Gaston de Latour sought to read Schelling somewhat critically, and if his essays on ‘Diaphaneitè’ and ‘Coleridge’ of some twenty years beforehand had also been sceptical of Schelling’s philosophy, then it is worth pointing out that one of his most famous, foundational and affirmative ideas from the period can also be traced to his reading of Schelling. For Pater, the aesthete should be ‘for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions’ (1980: 189), and aesthetic criticism should aim not simply ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ as Arnold had claimed (in an idea which was itself perhaps partly formed in a diffuse dialogue with Schelling, as we saw in Chapter 6), but ‘to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly’ (1980: x). These ideas too can be traced to Pater’s response to Schelling, through the concept of the ‘stream’ of consciousness, one which would become so influential on the modernism of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and James Joyce (1882–1941). Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance had had its first life as the final seven paragraphs of his essay ‘Poems of William Morris’, also published in the Westminster Review, October 1868, only four years after his election to Brasenose. Pater begins with a focus on ‘physical life’ as ‘perpetual motion’, before showing that the ‘inward world of thought and feeling’ operates according to a similar flux, in passages likely inspired by the Erster Entwurf. There, Schelling had discussed the problem of permanence (Permanenz) in the natural world, introducing his theory of inhibition (Hemmung), and using the image of the stream to illustrate the flux of nature: ‘every product of this kind will represent a determinate sphere which Nature always fills anew, and into which the stream of its force incessantly gushes’ (SW I.3, 18; HKA I.7, 82; 2004: 18). Pater

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had used the same imagery, speaking of the ‘race of the midstream’ and the ‘stream’ of consciousness (1980: 187, 188). Schelling is hardly alone in using the imagery of the stream in the context of a philosophy of nature, as Pater himself demonstrated when reworking the passages for inclusion in the Renaissance and prefacing the conclusion with a Greek epigraph from Heraclitus. Nevertheless, the idea that the Erster Entwurf was Pater’s source for this famous passage becomes stronger when we look at Schelling’s own footnote in explication of the imagery of the stream: A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance – a whirlpool forms. Every original product of nature is such a whirlpool, every organism. The whirlpool is not something immobilized; it is rather something constantly transforming – but reproduced anew at each moment. Thus no product of nature is fixed, but it is reproduced at each instant through the force of nature entire. (SW I.3, 18; HKA I.7, 276; 2004: 18)

Schelling illustrates the theory of the flux and its ‘inhibitions’ not simply through the image of the ‘stream’ (Strom), but specifically through that of the ‘whirlpool’ (Wirbel), and so too Pater, who in moving from discussing the philosophy of nature in the first paragraph to consciousness in the second, deploys the imagery of a ‘whirlpool […] still more rapid’ (1980: 187).21 ‘At each moment comes a new impulse’, Schelling writes, or, as Pater would put it, a new impression or ‘pulsation’ (Schelling’s Pulsieren). Indeed, Schelling was clearly so taken with the imagery, considering it so emblematic of his Naturphilosophie taken as a whole, that he would reuse it, almost verbatim, a couple of months later in his Einleitung, writing that where a stream ‘meets resistance, a whirlpool is formed; this whirlpool is not an abiding thing, but something that vanishes at every moment, and every moment springs up anew’ (SW I.3, 289; HKA I.8, 45–46; 2004: 206). Our life, Pater contends, comes down to ‘a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream’, something which exists in the diaphanous space ‘between form and the formless’, as Schelling would say (SW I.3, 33; HKA I.7, 92; 2004: 28). For these reasons, Pater argues, we must privilege aesthetic experience, by its nature transient, as that which gives ‘the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’ (1980: 190).

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What is at stake in Pater’s aesthetic philosophy, which privileges the fleeting instant of forming impressions, is exactly a question of ‘verschwinden’, ‘that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ (1980: 188). It is Schelling’s ästhetische Anschauung as a philosophy of aestheticism, and where this aesthetic intuition is a question of ‘vital forces’, what Schelling calls Lebenskraft.

Coda: Bosanquet No discussion of Schelling’s reception in nineteenth-century British aesthetic theory could be complete without considering the figure of Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923). Bosanquet was another Balliol figure, matriculating in 1866, before he became a Fellow of University College, Oxford, in 1870. He studied under Jowett, but was more influenced by Green and by Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846–1892), becoming a leading figure in the second generation of British idealists. His A History of Æesthetic (1892) constituted the first history of its subject in English, and A.C. Bradley, Oxford Professor of Poetry and author of Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), called Bosanquet ‘the only British philosopher of the first rank who had dealt fully’ with aesthetics (1923: 570). As with most of the other figures associated with British idealism, Bosanquet was more indebted to Hegel than he was to Schelling, and this was also true in his aesthetic criticism. He had translated The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art (1886) into English, prefacing it with a critical introduction. But in his A History of Æesthetic, Bosanquet argued that most, if not all, of Hegel’s most significant aesthetic ideas were derived from Schelling. Bosanquet quotes Hegel’s estimation of Schelling in his Ästhetik that it was in his philosophy ‘that the actual notion of art and its place in scientific history were discovered’ (Hegel 1886: 120; Bosanquet 1892: 317). Even if Hegel did not have access to the manuscript of the Philosophie der Kunst, Bosanquet contends, the essence of his aesthetics were available in the System and other published work, ‘and there can be no doubt that Hegel [was] immensely influenced by Schelling’s views of art and aesthetic philosophy’ (1892: 334). For Bosanquet, Schelling’s significance to aesthetic theory came down to three points: the objectivity he ascribed to art; the dynamical and historical relationship he saw between ancient and modern art; and his contribution to the evaluation and classification of particular arts (1892: 318). With reference to the former, Bosanquet

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notes that ‘the superiority [he] assigned to art over philosophy is the distinctive point in which Hegel and Schelling differ’ (1892: 319), and he quotes and cites the System, showing a detailed knowledge of this work. On the differences between ancient and modern art, Bosanquet is impressed both by Schelling’s treatment of Homer,22 and, more so, by that of Dante. Here, he draws on argument that the ‘comedy’ of the Divina Commedia must be understood in a modern sense. ‘He [Dante] himself called his great work a Comedy’, Bosanquet notes, ‘because it is written in the vernacular, in which even women converse, and therefore must be regarded as, in a humble style, contrasted with that of tragedy’ (1892: 152). And in discussing Schelling’s contribution to our understanding of particular arts, Bosanquet again relies on sources which, if not new to British audiences, were not widely read: both the Philosophie der Kunst and Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft. But Bosanquet does not simply content himself with discussing Schelling’s aesthetics in its German context, or in the context of those particular works which he himself had discussed. Bosanquet also makes some important links with British aesthetic theory. Most notably, we find the following: The belief […] that ‘Natur-philosophie’ is the first adumbration of the future world-mythology, may be taken as an anticipation of the Modern Painters, in as far as the essence of the latter work is to disclose the rational and symbolic content of natural phenomena. (1892: 326)

The allusion is to the last volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1860) on ‘Invention Spiritual’, in which Ruskin returned to the natural theology developed in the Romantic painting of J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), discussed in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), arguing that such a Romanticism must need give way to a renewed interest in mythology.23 Indeed, for Bosanquet, ideas drawn from Schelling’s aesthetic philosophy could be traced throughout the British aesthetic literature of the nineteenth century. And if contemporary Pater critics have struggled to see the extent to which his aestheticism was indebted to Schelling, Bosanquet was not so blind. Discussing the differences between painting and sculpture in the Akademierede (SW I.7, 316; 1845: 25), Bosanquet quotes Pater’s Renaissance: ‘colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit’ (Bosanquet 1892: 329; quoting Pater 1980: 45).

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Ultimately, however, Bosanquet came to the determination that Schelling’s aesthetics, if suggestive, were inadequate. In the end, Schelling’s classification of the various arts amount a ‘serial arrangement’ or ‘a piece of arbitrary formalism’ when compared with Hegel’s historical approach (1892: 332). ‘Schelling at his best has a profusion of thought and brilliancy of suggestion with which Hegel cannot compare’, Bosanquet concludes: ‘But soon the reader finds that he is an untrustworthy guide; impatient, incoherent, credulous, with no sterling judgment of art, and with a constant bias to the sentimental and the superstitious’ (1892: 334). Thus, for all his suggestive and nuanced appreciation of Schelling’s aesthetics, Bosanquet was ultimately still a Hegelian.

Notes







1. The identity of the author of the fragmentary ‘Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus’ [Oldest System Programme of German Idealism] (c. 1796) has been disputed, but it appears to be in Hegel’s hand. Still, during this period, it reflects the position of both Hölderlin and Schelling as well. 2.  On Coleridge’s distinctions between allegory and myth, see Shaffer (1975: 137–144), and on Schelling distinctions related to his philosophy of mythology, see Beach (1994: 25–45). 3. On tautegory, see in particular Hamilton (2007: 103–111); for Hamilton, understanding this term is ‘the key to understanding [Coleridge’s] use of Schelling. He envied “the many untranslatable Words” available to the German philosopher and finally found one of his own’ (2007: 17; quoting Coleridge’s marginalia 1998: 358, on the Darlegung, SW I.7, 97). Whistler argues that Schelling uses the idea of tautegory in a manner comparable to how he had used ‘symbol’ in the Philosophie der Kunst (2013: 38). 4.  Schelling himself discusses points of comparison between Müller’s Prolegomena zueiner wissenschaftlichen Mythologie [Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology] (1825) in his later lectures (SW II.1, 199–202; 2007: 139–141). 5.  Keightley directs his readers to Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826) as an antidote to Schelling. In his Antisymbolik, Voss was scathing of Schelling’s Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, which in his opinion showed an ‘unholy fuzziness’ [unheiliges Fäserchen] of historical knowledge and of ‘logical criticism’ (1824: 371).

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6. Later, Müller would make a similar point when comparing Schelling with Kapila of Samkhya and alluding to the Freiheitsschrift: ‘He seems to have felt what Schelling felt, that sadness cleaves to all finite life’ (1899: 390; referring to SW I.7, 399; 2006: 62). 7. For only one such example of the ways in which Müller’s idea of henotheism was deployed in a Chinese context by the missionary James Johnston (1819–1905), see Sun (2016: 52–61). 8. This was a phrase which he returned to on other occasions in his published work: see Müller (1887: 45). 9. Through Müller, the idea became popularised in later Victorian intellectual circles. Emilia Dilke (1840–1904) knew Müller personally through her husband, Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. In her discussion of The Renaissance of Art in France, she deployed the idea in a different context: ‘When Schelling was asked, “What makes an Ethnos?” he answered, “Language and religion.” All fertile movements, destined widely to affect the future of the race, movements which bring new life to other forms of human energy, bear in their breasts the seeds of renewed ethical impulse. The Renaissance is no exception’ (Pattison 1879: 1: 29). 10. In this sense, Gladstone becomes Müller’s Wolf. Schelling’s philosophy of mythology finds itself in constant dialogue with Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) and his Prologomena ad Homerum (1795). On this point, see Williamson (2004: 62–63). 11. On Pater and Hegel, see Shuter (1997: 61–77), Ward (1966: 53–77), and Whiteley (2010). 12. In point of fact, Schelling is only actually mentioned in two of the passages McGrath identifies; his limited reading is suggested by the fact that no work by Schelling is listed in his bibliography. 13.  The Westminster Review was owned by John Chapman, whose important role in the dissemination of Schelling’s thought in mid-Victorian Britain was discussed in Chapter 6. 14.  Pater’s final phrase perhaps suggests Schelling’s 1810 Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen on the relationship between temperament (Germüth) and character (Charakter) (SW I.7, 465–467; HKA II.8, 154–158; Pfau 1994: 229–231). On these passages, see Shaw (2010: 129–135). 15. The quotation is from Heinrich Heine’s (1797–1856) Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland [On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany] (1833). 16.  Pater had been in an affair with the poet William Money Hardinge (1854–1916), the poet (then an undergraduate), when Jowett came into possession of some letters incriminating him, blackmailing Pater out of running for promotion: see Inman (1991).

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17. In a recent paper on ‘Walter Pater’s archetype of the arts: transcendental morphology in The Renaissance’ delivered at the British Association of Victorian Studies conference, 23 May 2017, Jordan Kistler argued that Pater’s theory of type rested on his interest in contemporary science, and particularly that of Richard Owen. The point is germane to the ways in which not only Pater’s, but the wider Victorian reception of Schelling was disseminated diffusely. Take as but one relevant example Pater’s late comment on ‘Darwin and Darwinism, for which “type” itself properly is not but is always becoming’ (1910e: 19). 18. Compare Müller’s wording in The Science of Religion, in which the same terms appear in precisely the same order as in Pater’s essay: ‘You know how all speculations on the nature of language, on its origin, its development, its natural growth and inevitable decay, had to be taken up afresh from the very beginning, after the new light thrown on the history of language by the comparative method’ (1872: 101). 19.  On Schelling’s treatment the three potencies of Dionysus: Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus and Dionysus Iakchos, see Beach (1994: 205–230). 20. In the unpublished manuscript on the ‘History of Philosophy’, Pater links Schelling and Bruno’s philosophies of nature: ‘that idea of a world actually embodying the intelligence, as a body the soul, lives on from Bruno […] to reappear in Schelling’s philosophy of the “identity” […] which again has its purely political equivalent in Wordsworth’s peculiar apprehension of the natural world as animated by an inherent intelligence or personality or will. Something like this, in briefest outline, has been the development of the natural ideal—of the idea of nature, as a reasonable system; a world in which man was no longer a merely vagrant creature; about which, intellectually at least, he could find his way, and orientate himself […]; a world in which the illuminated reason felt itself everywhere at home[.]’ bMS Eng 1150 (3), 18r-18v, held at Houghton Library, Harvard University. 21. While Inman (1981: 84) has suggested the possible influence of Johannes Peter Müller’s (1801–1858) Handbuch der Physiologie (1833–1840), translated by William Baly (1814–1861) as Elements of Physiology (1840–1843), the standard textbook on the subject, lurking behind Pater’s treatment of science in these paragraphs, Müller at no point appeals to the imagery of either the stream or the whirlpool. Yet it is worth pointing out that not only is there no evidence to suggest that Pater had read Müller (as Inman herself concedes), but that even if he had done so, Müller’s theories were all developed within the context of Naturphilosophie, and thus under the penumbra of Schelling (even if he was later to explicitly break with Schelling in turning to physiognomy).

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22. ‘The representation of a divine being was to the Greek not a mere symbol, but a likeness; not a symbol which might faintly suggest Him who could be known only in the spirit, but a likeness of one who dwelt on earth, and whose nature was to be visible, and not to be invisible. Thus, in speaking of a question about the supernatural in Homer, Schelling has said that in Homer there is no supernatural, because the Greek god is a part of nature’ (Bosanquet 1892: 12). 23. For a different but related reading of Ruskin’s Modern Painters alongside Schelling, see Hamilton (2007: 111–118).

Works Cited Abbott, Everlyn, and Lewis Campbell. 1897. The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Anon. 1794. Review of Paulus’s Memorabilien. British Critic (August): 208. Beach, Edward Allen. 1994. The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology. Albany: SUNY Press. Bosanquet, Bernard. 1892. A History of Æesthetic. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Bradley, A.C. 1923. Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923). Proceedings of the British Academy 10: 563–575. Bunsen, Christian Charles Josias. 1867. Egypt’s Place in Universal History: Vol. IV. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Bunsen, Frances Waddington. 1868. A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Coleridge, S.T. 1959. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume IV, 1815–1819, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1993. Aids to Reflection. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 9, ed. John Beer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 11, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. Marginalia IV. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 12, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Constant, Benjamin. 2002. Journaux Intimes (1804–1807), ed. Paul Delbouille and Kurt Kloocke. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Dellamora, Richard. 1990. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. F. 1816. Notice of a German Treatise, Entitled: Ueber die Gottheiten Von Samothrace. Classical Journal 14: 59–64. Hamilton, Paul. 2007. Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic. London: Continuum.

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Hegel, G.W.F. 1886. The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. Bernard Bosanquet. London: Kegan Paul & Co. Hölderlin, Friedrich. 2003. Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism. In Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J.M. Bernstein, 185–187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inman, Billie Andrew. 1981. Walter Pater’s Reading. London: Garland. ———. 1990. Walter Pater and His Reading, 1874–1877. London: Garland. ———. 1991. Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett and William M. Hardinge. In Pater in the 1990s, ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small, 1–20. Greensboro: ELT Press. Keightley, Thomas. 1838. The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, 2nd ed. London: Whittaker and Co. Lang, Andrew. 1898. The Making of Religion. London: Longmans, Green and Co. McGrath, F.C. 1986. The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm. Tampa: University of Florida Press. Monsman, Gerald. 1971. Pater, Hopkins and Fichte’s Ideal Student. South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (3): 365–376. Müller, Friedrich Max. 1870. Chips from a German Workshop, 4 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1871. Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols., 6th ed. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1872. Lectures on the Science of Religion. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1887. The Science of Thought. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1888. Natural Religion. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1897. Contributions to the Science of Mythology, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1899. The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1901. My Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1902. The Life and Letters of Friedrich Max Müller, ed. Georgina Müller, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 2002. The Essential Max Müller: On Language, Mythology, and Religion, ed. Jon R. Stone. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Müller, Karl Otfried. 1828. Die Etrusker, 2 vols. Breslau: Josef Max. Pater, Walter. 1910a. Appreciations. London: Macmillan. ———. 1910b. Gaston de Latour. London: Macmillan. ———. 1910c. Greek Studies. London: Macmillan. ———. 1910d. Miscellaneous Studies. London: Macmillan. ———. 1910e. Plato and Platonism. London: Macmillan. ———. 1980. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Pattison, Mrs Mark. 1879. The Renaissance of Art in France, 2 vols. London: Kegan Paul & Co. Pfau, Thomas. 1994. Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling. Albany: SUNY Press. Robinson, Henry Crabb. 2010. Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus. London: MHRA. Schelling, F.W.J. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1845. The Philosophy of Art: An Oration on the Relation Between the Plastic Arts and Nature, trans. A. Johnson. London: John Chapman. ———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 1984. Bruno, or On the Nature and Divine Principle of Things, trans. Michael G. Vater. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2004. First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Pearson. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2006. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2007. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. Albany: SUNY Press. Shaffer, E.S. 1975. ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Devin Zane. 2010. Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art. London: Continuum. Shuter, William. 1997. Rereading Walter Pater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sun, Anna. 2016. The Study of Chinese Religions in the Social Sciences: Beyond the Monotheistic Assumption. In Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies, ed. Kiri Paramore, 51–72. London: Bloomsbury. Voss, Johann Heinrich. 1824. Antisymbolik. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler’schen. Ward, Anthony. 1966. Walter Pater: The Idea in Nature. London: Macgibbon and Kee. Whistler, Daniel. 2013. Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whiteley, Giles. 2010. Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism. Oxford: Legenda. Wilde, Oscar. 2005. De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, George. 2004. The Longing for Myth: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2013. “In the Arms of Gods”: Schelling, Hegel, and the Problem of Mythology. In The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle, Liz Disley, and Nicholas Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Thomas. 1907. The Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols. London: Everett.

CHAPTER 11

Towards a Modern Reading of Schelling

In an unpublished manuscript on the ‘History of Philosophy’, dating to the early 1880s, Walter Pater suggested that Kant’s ‘three ideals’ had formed the central ‘constructive’ foundations of the history of modern thought. But Kant’s Kritiks, Pater continued, had also become a kind of limit point for nineteenth-century philosophy. As he puts it in his late essay on ‘Prosper Mérimée’ (1890), ‘after Kant’s criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass beyond the limits of individual experience seemed as dead as those of old French royalty’ (1910a: 11). Hegel is picked out by Pater as the case in point: for all his grand pretensions in attempting to move beyond Kant, his philosophy was in its results ultimately ‘negative’ or ‘destructive’. Hegel’s system was undermined by ‘a radical dualism […], as to the extent of which he was perhaps not always quite candid, even with himself’.1 If we listen for it, we perhaps hear an echo of Schelling in the judgment Pater passes on Hegel’s project. Hegel himself had damned Schelling’s philosophy for trying ‘to palm off its Absolute as the night in which […] all cows are black’ (§16; 1970: 3:22; 1977: 9), a cruel blow, which Schelling found, and still finds, hard to live down. His philosophical reply to his former friend, taking the form of his new positive philosophy, was long in the making, but it was only really at the moment of his symbolic assumption of Hegel’s seat in Berlin that the wider world began to gain some understanding of the stakes of Schelling’s new philosophical project. Much of this wider world was singularly unimpressed; the responses, as we saw in Chapter 5, were lukewarm at best, although © The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_11

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the British auditors seem to have been less dismissive than Kierkegaard and Engels. But for our purposes, what is significant is that, just like Pater in the manuscript on the ‘History of Philosophy’, Schelling’s response, developed first in the Weltalter, and then in his lectures Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, and on Philosophie der Mythologie and Philosophie der Offenbarung, characterised Hegel’s system as one which ultimately constituted a negative rather than a positive philosophy. As Schelling put it, ‘the science that accomplishes [the] elimination of what is contingent in the first concepts of being […] is of the negative type, and possesses in its result what we have called being itself [das Seyende selbst], yet still only in thought’ (SW II.3, 79; 2007a: 144). One should hardly be surprised, Schelling points out, that the results of such a rationalising system were ultimately only rational ones, unable to speak to the intuitive or unconscious potencies and forces that underwrite lived experience in the world. The philosophical issue lies in the fact that such a negative philosophy ‘brings itself only so far as the logically mediated concept in thought’ and is ‘incapable of demonstrating it in its own existence’ (SW II.3, 79; 2007a: 145). It is precisely, then, this kind of ‘negative’ philosophy characteristic of Hegel that led to Pater’s accusation that his system suffered from a ‘radical dualism’. In this sense, perhaps this image of Hegel the philosopher lies behind the character of Prior Saint-Jean in his late imaginary portrait ‘Apollo in Picardy’, a figure who comes to find himself ‘divid[ed] hopelessly against […] the well-ordered kingdom of his thought’ (1910a: 143). Hegel’s dry logical abstractions end up splitting him off from both the conditions of his thought and from the world itself. Only a positive philosophy such as the one that Schelling began to develop could hope to speak about the foundations of a real, lived experience. Philosophy à la Hegel ‘could only have a negative meaning’, as Schelling puts it (SW II.3, 80; 2007a: 145). In the figures of Pater and Müller, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century and focusing on the later Schelling’s philosophy of mythology, we see something of a Victorian anticipation of some of the ways in which Schelling has been rediscovered in contemporary Anglophone philosophy and literary studies in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Andrew Bowie has argued, recent attempts at overcoming ‘Western metaphysics’ have tended to focus predominantly on the philosophy of Hegel as a foil (1993: 127), and it is in this context that there has been a resurgence of interest in Schelling. Positive philosophy has been rediscovered as unzeitgemässe, untimely

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in its critique of Hegel. Indeed, the contemporary ‘meditations’ on Schelling, to use Jason Wirth’s term (2003), are themselves untimely, since they see foreshadowed in his philosophy certain anticipations of later debates, particularly in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. But in point of fact, as we have seen throughout the course of this book, British readers often found themselves drawn to precisely these kinds of issues already during the nineteenth century. In this sense, the ‘New Schelling’ rediscovered by critics such as Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (2004) is in many ways a figure who had always been there, but had simply been forgotten. Rediscovering this untimely Schelling is another example of the ways in which reading Schelling can be a kind of uncanny experience. Take Pater once more. As his career progressed, Pater became fascinated with ‘the idea of what is called an “unconscious” period of human mind’.2 He associated this period with a ‘poetic’ and a mythological time preceding Greek culture and civilization, one when man was in closer communion with the natural world. This ‘unconscious’ period is, of course, the central thematic question underwriting Schelling’s positive philosophy. In his later philosophy, Schelling had sought to answer a set of interrelated questions. He sought to understand the origins of mythology, and the conditions of possibility for the ‘grounding’ of a positive philosophy. For Schelling, mythology originated in a period which he too speaks of as being ‘unconscious’, one before both the idea of nation and culture, and the idea of language itself, whose ‘depths exceed by far that of the most conscious product’ (SW II.1, 52; 2007b: 40). That language precedes consciousness as its precondition is an idea which we associate today with poststructuralism, either with Lacan or with Derrida.3 But, as we saw in the last chapter, it was an idea which Müller had begun to popularize for British readers in the later nineteenth century, if in an admittedly different context. Alongside these investigations, Schelling also sought to understand the prehistory of the world itself, a time when the Absolute itself was ‘unconscious’, or rather, a time before such distinctions were meaningful. As he puts it in the Weltalter, it was only ‘in the dawning of consciousness [that] the unconscious is posited as the past of consciousness’ (SW I.8, 252; 2000: 44). In this sense, Pater’s meditations on the ‘unconscious’ ground of mythology find themselves in dialogue with Coleridge, one of the first of the British readers to begin to grasp the significance of Schelling’s idea of the Ungrund. In his lecture ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, inspired

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in part by his reading of Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, he characterises Greek civilization as ‘the dawn of approaching manhood’ (1995: 1267). Before the Greeks, a time ‘long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry’, lay ‘mythic’ time, Coleridge argued (1995: 1267). But before this lay ‘something that precedes the Beginning itself’, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, ‘a rotary motion whose vicious cycle is broken’ (1996: 13). Coleridge discusses this impossible moment of genesis through which ‘the unbeginning, self-sufficing, and immutable Creator’ is ripped apart in ‘night or chaos’ (1995: 1272), what Schelling calls ‘the point of departure’ in which the Absolute ‘shrouds [the] beginning in dark night’ (SW I.8, 207; 2000: 3). It is this moment which permits and makes possible the movement from drive to desire, or, in Lacanian terms, the movement from Real to Symbolic. For Pater, this movement is ‘a step which can never be retraced’,4 in an explosive sundering of the fabric of existence in an ‘orgasm of forces’, to use Žižek’s memorable phrasing (1996: 13). And much of Pater’s most striking mature work ends up mediating on this impossible and irrecoverable movement, ‘le pas au-delà’, to use Blanchot’s phrase (1992), the step beyond which effaces itself as such and which can never take place. But this ‘unconscious abyss’ is not only a kind of Urszene which lies before the beginning of time. In addition, this kind of ‘bewußtloses Thätigheit’ [unconscious activity] is at work within the very subject itself. The question of the ‘unconscious’ was one which became more central to British thought as the nineteenth century progressed. In the final decades, the idea became particularly associated with Eduard von Hartmann, whose Philosophie des Unbewussten had been translated by William Chatterton Coupland in 1884. Therein, Hartmann explained his debts to Schelling, in whom ‘we find […] the conception of the Unconscious in its full purity, clearness, and depth’ (1884: 1: 24). As we have seen, Hartmann’s work was influential on a number of important late Victorian writers, such as Thomas Hardy, and another interested party was the novelist Samuel Butler (1835–1902), remembered today for the satire Erewhon (1872) and his semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903). In 1880, Butler published his Unconscious Memory, which translated passages from Hartmann a few years before Coupland’s edition, including ones dealing with Schelling, and which he commented upon (1880: 211, 225). In a review in the Pall Mall Gazette, Coupland’s translation was praised, particularly for the ways in which it might be considered ‘an attempt at rapprochement between the English and the

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German modes of thought’ (Anon. 1884: 5), but in point of fact, the British had been interested in these kinds of ideas for many years before the translation had been published. Ten years earlier, a review of Moritz Venetianer’s Der Allgeist (1874) in the same periodical had pointed out the ways in which Hartmann’s philosophy, like Schelling’s, could be conceived of as a kind of pantheism. The review gave a summary of Schelling’s argument in Von der Weltseele, before linking his idea of an unconscious Ungrund to contemporary evolutionary theory: ‘the “short steps through immense periods of time” of Darwin are here anticipated. And the result which Schelling arrived was that “One and the same principle unites inorganic and organic nature”’ (Anon. 1874: 12; quoting SW I.2, 350; HKA I.6, 70). It was another kind of uncanny anticipation attributed to Schelling. The reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette was open in his invocation of Schelling, but more broadly, the German philosopher became a figure whose name would often be cited in these kinds of contexts in the final decades of the nineteenth century, his ideas functioning as a kind of diffuse backdrop to the topic. Schelling’s name became associated with the fads for mesmerism and animal magnetism, and more broadly with the spiritualist and theosophical movements which burgeoned towards the fin de siècle. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, there are virtually no English-language references to Schelling’s novella Clara during the nineteenth century, but when the British discussed animal magnetism, Schelling’s name was often brought into the equation, if somewhat imprecisely or, in the case of Andrew Lang, dismissively.5 This imprecision is significant, since Schelling’s naming in these discursive contexts was more a strategic than an attributive one; in this sense, it mirrors many of his invocations within the discourse of Victorian theology. Schelling was a figure sufficiently famous to be recognised, but not one who the average reader would have been likely to have known in detail. Thus we find that in the journal Light, the publication of the London Spiritualist Alliance, Schelling’s name was often invoked during the 1880s in different and occasionally opposed contexts. In one of the most detailed of these engagements, the publication of Alfred Percy Sinnett’s (1840–1921) Esoteric Buddhism (1883) sent one correspondent ‘back to Schelling’, and they spent time elucidating the links between Sinnett’s ideas and Schelling on ‘the great primordial and persistent one, in its two aspects as expansive an contractive, male and female, spirit and matter’ (C.M.M. 1883: 320). Sinnett’s book itself did

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not discuss Schelling, but he was a member of the Theosophical Society, formed in New York in 1875 by the Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), another figure during the period who was prone to throwing Schelling’s name around. Unlike many of her peers, however, we can be sure that she had actually read Schelling, quoting and translating from the Ideen (1893: 556) in The Secret Doctrine (1888). Still, when reckoning the extent to which Schelling’s nineteenthcentury British reception impacted upon currents in his twentieth ­century reception, a more important tributary was the one which flowed from Müller and particularly Pater on the unconscious through to early psychoanalysis. Pater’s translation of Schelling’s ‘whirlpool’ of the Erster Entwurf into the idea of the stream of consciousness, came to greatly impact modernism and its engagement with Freud and the idea of the fragmented subject. As Virginia Woolf, who had been tutored as a child by Clara Pater (1841–1910), Walter’s sister, wrote in her diary in 1939, ‘Freud is upsetting: reducing one to whirlpool; & I daresay truly’ (1984: 248). But another significant figure here was William James, with whom the idea of the stream of consciousness is today most associated. Like Pater, James rarely spoke of Schelling in print, but towards the end of his life he came to develop his own version of a ‘comminuted’ or ‘pulverised’ Identitätsphilosophie (Wilshire 1997: 103). James may have first encountered Schelling through his father, William James Sr. (1811–1882), who had become interested in Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) around 1841 from reading articles on the subject by James John Garth Wilkinson (1812–1899) published in the Monthly Magazine, and thereafter befriended Emerson, who in his turn introduced James Sr. to Carlyle. James Sr. was widely read in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century German philosophy, and his son likewise caught the transcendental bug. William James records an intensive period of ‘reading of the revival, or rather the birth, of German literature’ in 1869, including literature about Schelling, if no definitive evidence of any titles by him (James 1920: 1: 141). Regardless, James seems to have been influenced, even if only diffusely, by Schelling. Take The Varieties of Religion Experience (1902), for instance, which not only deals with ‘mythic’ time, but which also considers the ways in which aesthetic experience may unconsciously reveal these kinds of experiences. Indeed, his close friend Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the father of pragmatism, wrote enthusiastically to James of Schelling in a letter of 28 January 1894, where he admitted that his own philosophy was

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influenced by Schelling - by all stages of Schelling, but especially the Philosophie der Natur. I consider Schelling as enormous, and one thing I admire about him is his freedom from the trammels of system, and his holding himself uncommitted to any previous utterance. In that, he is like a scientific man. If you were to call my philosophy Schellingism transformed in the light of modern physics, I should not take it hard. (Wilshire 1997: 106)6

This remarkable profession on the part of Peirce, considering as a strength of Schelling’s thought what so many during the Romantic and Victorian period deemed his greatest weakness, namely his shifting between systems, is striking. For James’ part, the links between his thought and Pater’s on the ‘stream of consciousness’ are perhaps best demonstrated not just by his famous paper on the subject (1892), but in his Hibbert lectures, ‘On the Present Situation in Philosophy’, delivered at Oxford in 1908 and published the following year as A Pluralistic Universe. It was therein that James developed his ‘pulverised’ Identitätsphilosophie: ‘In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own body […], of the earth’s geography and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad’ (1977: 129). The phrasing recalls both Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance and the Erster Entwurf which in part inspired it, in its emphasis on Pulsieren, ‘pulsations’: ‘your pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they to it’ (1977: 129; compare Pater 1980: 187–188). Freud, for his part, was clearly more influenced by Schelling than he might have liked to admit on the evidence of his dismissals in his Selbstdarstellung (GW 14: 86; SE 20: 59–60). This influence was occasionally direct, but more often diffuse, as we saw in the introduction when discussing the source of Freud’s citation of Schelling in ‘Das Unheimliche’ via Daniel Sanders (GW 12: 234; SE 17: 224). But Freud saw in Schelling a clear precursor for his theory of dreams in Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] (1899) (GW 2: 4; SE 4: 5), even if he deemed Naturphilosophie itself as a discipline which, in its lack of ‘scientific’ rigour, had been an impediment to the wider acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas which were all too often misunderstood as ‘mystical’.7 And alongside reading Hartmann, who Freud acknowledges for his theories of the relationship between aesthetic production and the unconscious (GW 3: 532; SE 5: 528), ones which

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themselves rested on Schellingean foundations, he was also reading James Sully, a writer who is praised for being ‘more firmly convinced, perhaps, than any other psychologist that dreams have a disguised meaning’ (GW 2: 62; SE 4: 60). We have already discussed Sully’s reading of Schelling’s Freiheitsschreift on melancholia in Chapter 6. Considering the Nachtwachen, which Sully misattributes to Schelling, in a passage influential on Hardy, Sully makes a comparison with Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which we discussed at length in Chapter 3, and which Sully claims looks ‘quite cheerful and flattering when judged by this merciless exposure of human nothingness’ (1877: 29). While Sully’s analysis here is wide of the mark given the actual authorship of the Nachtwachen, it shows just how easy the Victorians found it to make comparison between Teufelsdröckh and Schelling, and makes all the more remarkable the fact that his influence on Carlyle has been generally dismissed by the critical heritage. After Coleridge’s meditations, there was perhaps no more significant avenue through which Schelling’s ideas gained currency in nineteenth-century British literature than via Carlyle’s ironic novel. The added irony, of course, was that Schelling was not named in Sartor Resartus, so that his influence was, in effect, spectral. For Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh, the great Schellingean insight is into the nature of ‘force’. ‘Knowest thou any corner of the world where at least FORCE is not?’ he asks (1987: 55), and he ‘preaches forth the mystery of Force’ (1987: 56). In considering his theory of force, Teufelsdröckh is taken by the idea of decay, a quality which has also fascinated some of Schelling’s most important late twentieth century readers such as David Farrell Krell (1998: 73–114). Teufelsdröckh meditates, à la Pater in the conclusion to the Renaissance, on life as a kind of ‘perpetual metamorphoses’: ‘The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot?’ (1987: 56). Indeed, it is in this theory of force, one which distinguished his Naturphilosophie and put it into opposition with the ‘mechanistic’ physics and philosophy which had dominated British eighteenth century intellectual culture, that Schelling has been rediscovered. As Heidegger puts it, ‘Schelling does not think “concepts”; he thinks forces and thinks from the positions of the will’ (1985: 111). Here, a different set of tributaries flow from Heidegger towards the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), via an influence on both, Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944).8 For Deleuze, who was famously

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hostile to Hegel, Schelling’s theory of potencies had been vastly misunderstood and misinterpreted after Hegel: The most important aspect of Schelling’s philosophy is his consideration of powers. How unjust, in this respect, is Hegel’s critical remark about the black cows! Of these two philosophers, it is Schelling who brings difference out of the night of the Identical, and with finer, more varied and more terrifying flashes of lightening than those of contradiction: with progressivity. (2004: 240)

Referring to the model of three potencies Schelling had sketched in the Philosophie der Mythologie, Deleuze continues, A, A2, A3 form the play of pure depotentialization and potentiality […]. It is here that division finds its scope, which is not in breadth in the differentiation of species within the same genus, but in depth in derivation and potentialisation, already a kind of differentiation. (2004: 240)

Deleuze’s analysis of Schelling’s significance, one which emphasises a theory of difference, of Schelling the philosopher of potencies and forces, reminds us of a number of the ways in which his philosophy influenced nineteenth-century British philosophy. In his Theory of Life, we saw how force was both originary and excessive in Coleridge’s Naturphilosophie. It is excessive in the sense that forces are not exhausted either by their origination or their activity. As he puts it in his lecture ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, if ‘the first product of its energy is the thing itself’, then the ‘productive energy [of the Idea] is not exhausted in this product, but overflows, or is effluent as the specific forces, properties, faculties of the product’ (1995: 1274). This overflowing overflows the subject, in a becoming which recalls James in A Pluralistic Universe. It links the Pulsieren of the body to the whole of ‘the earth’s geography’ (James 1977: 129), in a kind of Schellingean ‘geology of morals’. This latter idea is one which, for Deleuze, is read through Steffens, as a philosophy of forces and potencies which becomes conceivable as a kind of ‘universal ungrounding’ (1994: 80–82). By this, Deleuze understands ‘the freedom of the non-mediated ground, the discovery of a ground behind every other ground, the relation between the groundless and the ungrounded’ (1994: 80), what Schelling calls ‘the non-ground that precedes any ground’ (SW I.7, 406; 2004: 69).9

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Perhaps surprisingly, then, we find in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism another of Schelling’s uncanny echoes. Indeed, it is precisely on the grounds of this kind of pluralistic, even ‘Deleuzian’ philosophy of difference, that Schelling is often encountered today in contemporary philosophy. In this sense, he seems to be not only a figure straddling Romanticism and the Victorian age, but one who remains our own contemporary in terms of what his philosophy still seems able to say and do. Through Deleuze and the interpretation of Iain Hamilton Grant (2006), Schelling’s Naturphilosophie has found itself placed into dialogue with object orientated ontology and new materialism, and in the work of Timothy Morton, Schelling’s Lebensphilosophie finds itself a kind of precursor of contemporary ecological thinking and the idea of a ‘dark ecology’ (2007: 70). Both mark unzeitgemässe readings of Schelling and mark Schelling himself as untimely. This indeed is precisely the point, and precisely what we have seen in the course of this book in different ways: Schelling’s reception in nineteenth-century British literature, just like Schelling’s reception today, was and is always in some way untimely. During Romanticism, he was encountered by Coleridge as a figure who had apparently anticipated, ‘coincidentally’, his own aesthetic theory. Crabb Robinson, reading Schelling, and attempting to explain his ideas to de Staël and Constant, led to the untimely coining of the idea of ‘l’art pour l’art’. In Scotland, Schelling was discovered in response to common sense philosophy and ‘refracted’, to use de Quincey’s term, in the projects of Hamilton, Carlyle and Ferrier, so that his philosophy because hybridized. Moreover, through the long, drawn-out and acrimonious battles of Coleridge’s legacy in the plagiarism controversy, Schelling’s ideas were shown to have been in circulation through the English poet, even if the public had not been fully aware of the fact that what they were reading was not always the author’s own words. Later, when Schelling moved to Berlin and the wider world began to glean something of an understanding of his new positive philosophy, it was an event which the periodical press portrayed as an untimely intervention into the Prussian political scene, promising a pregnant future yet to come. And when generations of British students went to study with Schelling, particularly in Munich and Berlin, they went in part not only to see a famous figure from the past, but also to gain a vision of this future. It was one which, through Schelling’s lectures on mythology and revelation, also meant coming to

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terms with a new way of understanding the deepest recesses of the past. In science, Schelling’s theories seemed to anticipate both the soon-to-bemade insights into electromagnetism with Davy and Faraday, but also, more diffusely, evolutionary theory with Green, Owen and Darwin. In theology, different versions of who Schelling was supposed to be were fielded to fight over some very different kinds of religious controversies on a British battlefield, so that Schelling became a kind of split subject, hopelessly divided against himself. A few years later, in a different kind of untimely anticipation, Schelling’s Scottish reception was revived by Mansel, and came to gradually morph into a new theological position, agnosticism, in a move which neither Schelling nor the British interlocutors who responded to his thought would have envisaged. In philosophy, Schelling was marginalised in the final decades of the century by the British idealists, but only through a series of strategic moves which rested ultimately on fallacious reasoning. But we also see that it was during the very same period that a different reading of Schelling was blossoming, indeed gaining ground in that very same Oxford that supposedly saw the unchallenged supremacy of Hegel, within the disciplines of comparative mythology and in the aestheticism movement. Both focused on Schelling’s philosophy of the unconscious and the Ungrund, and it is in this sense that Schelling’s reception by figures such as Müller and Pater may be said to have constituted important foundations for modernism, for early psychoanalytic thought and for a number of developments in later twentieth century continental philosophy. Taken as a whole, then, Schelling’s nineteenth-century British reception was far more rich and significant than has hitherto been recognised. It is this uncanny history that has been the subject of this book. And it has been a book which itself simply records one more moment in the history of Schelling’s reception. In this sense, this book too will perhaps be recognised as another kind of uncanny echo.

Notes 1. Walter Pater, ‘History of Philosophy’, bMS Eng 1150 (3), 20v, 6r, held at Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2. For a Lacanian reading of Schelling, see Žižek (1996), and for a reading of Schelling’s anticipations of Derrida and poststructuralism, see Bowie (1993: 67–75).

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3. Pater, ‘History of Philosophy’, 1r. Compare Schelling (SW I.8, 262; 2000: 44), and see also Pater’s discussion of these themes in his published work in Plato and Platonism (1910b: 7, 31). 4. Pater, ‘History of Philosophy’, 3v. 5. On the general ‘obscurity’ of Schelling’s Clara in Anglophone traditions, see Steinkamp (2002). For one such example of this broad-strokes association of Schelling with animal magnetism in British literature of the period, see Anon. (1872). See also Lang’s vague allusion in (1898: 32). 6. These kinds of profusions on Schelling were common during the period. In a draft of his 1893 ‘Reply to the Necessarians’, Peirce wrote ‘I frankly pigeon-hole myself as a modified Schellingean, or New England transcendentalist’ (2010: 392). 7.  See for instance his comments in Psychische Behandlung [Psychical Treatment] (GW 5: 290; SE 7: 283); Totem und Tabu (GW 9: 94; SE 13: 76); Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (GW 11: 13; SE 15: 20); and Die Widerstände Gegen die Psychoanalyse [Resistances to Psychoanalysis] (GW 14: 101; SE 19: 215). 8. For readings of Schelling and Deleuze, see Toscano (2004), Grant (2006: 187–198), and Ramey and Whistler (2014). 9. On Deleuze’s use of Steffens and Schelling on the idea of ‘ungrounding’, see Grant (2006: 8). In a note, Grant points out the sense in which the famous third plateau of Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille plateaux (1980), ‘10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals’ (2004: 43–82), which is written through the conceit of being a report on a late nineteenth century British lecture on the subject by Professor George Edward Challenger, one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) characters, is in dialogue with Naturphilosophie (Grant 2006: 23).

Works Cited Anon. 1872. German Philosophers and Magnetic Phenomena. The Spectator 45: 272–273. ———. 1872. Panpsychism. Pall Mall Gazette 9 April 1874: 11–12. ———. 1884. Review of von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. Pall Mall Gazette 14 May: 5. Blanchot, Maurice. 1992. The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany: SUNY Press. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. 1893. The Secret Doctrine, Volume I, Cosmogenesis, 3rd ed. London: Theosophical Publishing House. Bowie, Andrew. 1993. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy. London: Routledge. Butler, Samuel. 1880. Unconscious Memory. London: David Bogue.

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Carlyle, Thomas. 1987. Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry Sweeney and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. C.M.M. 1883. The Identity of Man and Nature. Light 3 (132): 320. Coleridge, S.T. 1995. Shorter Works and Fragments. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 11, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum. Freud, Sigmund. 1940–1952. GW. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols. London: Imago. ———. 1999. SE. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: Vintage. Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2006. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum. Hegel, G.W.F. 1970. Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise: On Essence Human Freedom. Athens: Ohio University Press. James, William. 1920. The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. ———. 1977. A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krell, David Farrell. 1998. Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lang, Andrew. 1898. The Making of Religion. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norman, Judith, and Alistair Welchman (eds.). 2004. The New Schelling. London: Continuum. Pater, Walter. 1910a. Miscellaneous Studies. London: Macmillan. ———. 1910b. Plato and Platonism. London: Macmillan. ———. 1980. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 2010. Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Volume 8, 1890–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ramey, Joshua, and Daniel Whistler. 2014. The Physics of Sense: Bruno, Schelling, Deleuze. In Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, ed. Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska, 91–114. Lanham: Lexington Books.

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Schelling, F.W.J. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 1976–. HKA. Historische-Kritische Ausgabe, 40 vols. Stuttgart. ———. 2000. The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2007a. The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, trans. Bruce Matthews. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2007b. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. Albany: SUNY Press. Steinkamp, Fiona. 2002. Schelling’s Clara: Editors’ Obscurity. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101 (4): 478–496. Sully, James. 1877. Pessimism: A History and Criticism. London: Henry S. King & Co. Toscano, Alberto. 2004. Philosophy and the Experience of Construction. In The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman, 106–127. London: Continuum. von Hartmann, Eduard. 1884. Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland, 3 vols. London: Trübner. Wilshire, Bruce. 1997. The Breathtaking Intimacy of the Material World: William James’s Last Thoughts. In The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam, 103–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wirth, Jason M. 2003. The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time. Albany: SUNY Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1984. Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 (1936–1941), ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth. Žižek, Slavoj. 1996. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso.

Index

A Abeken, Heinrich, 195, 196 Abernethy, John, 215, 218 Absolute, the, 15, 69, 82–84, 164, 179, 180, 191, 195, 216, 223, 225, 226, 228, 252, 273, 291, 292 act. See Tathandlung Adamson, Robert, 242, 249, 253 Addison, Joseph, 92 Aders, Charles, 211 Aeschylus, 17, 259, 260, 297 aestheticism, 25, 133, 162, 195, 252, 254, 271, 272, 275, 278, 280, 281, 299 aesthetics, 18, 20, 25, 41, 42, 45–49, 51, 53–55, 57, 108, 134, 141, 151, 154, 155, 168, 216, 271, 272, 275, 278–282, 294, 295. See also aestheticism; Anschauung; art agnosticism, 25, 183, 198, 200, 208, 224, 229, 230, 232, 299 Aikin, John, 36, 210 Aikman, John Logan, 191 Aitken, David, 74, 75 Aldrich, Henry, 224

Alford, Henry, 197 Alighieri, Dante, 281 Divina Commedia, 281 allegory, 132, 148, 149, 166, 259, 260. See also symbol; tautegory Allott, Kenneth, 159 Alxinger, Johann Baptist von, 92 America and the American reception of Schelling, 18, 27, 105, 135, 150, 156, 163, 194, 195, 226, 231 Ancillon, Friedrich, 34 Anglicanism, 178, 182–184, 186–189, 195, 197, 198, 200 animal magnetism, 57, 293, 300 Anschauung (intuition), 55, 70, 73, 81–83, 85, 87, 90 ästhetische Anschauung (aesthetic intuition), 55, 257, 280 intellektuelle Anschauung (intellectual intuition), 70, 73, 87–89, 225, 226 archetypes, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222, 284. See also evolutionary theory; homology Aristophanes, 224 Aristotle, 65, 90, 130, 179

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1

303

304  Index Arnim, Bettina von, 40 Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, 40 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 12, 24, 132, 135, 159–161, 169, 200, 278 ‘Empedocles on Etna’, 162 preface to Poems, 162 ‘In Utrumque Paratus’, 159 Arnold, Thomas, 129, 130, 158, 159, 161, 182, 200, 265 History of Rome, 129, 140, 158 Arnold, Tom, 159, 160, 200 art, 47, 48, 77, 141, 142, 147, 151, 152, 159, 168, 189, 194, 217, 252, 257, 258, 271–273, 275, 280–282, 298 atheism, 5, 39, 48, 53, 155, 179, 180, 183, 193, 200, 225 Austin, John, 150 Austin, Sarah, 68, 89, 150, 245 Characteristics of Goethe, 150 Fragments from German Prose Writers, 68, 150 meets Schelling, 245 B Baader, Franz von, 84 Bacon, Francis, 43 Bain, Alexander, 228, 253 Bakunin, Mikhail, 16, 121 Balfour, Arthur James, 169, 251 Baly, William, 284 Balzac, Honoré de, 148 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 36 Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Jules, 68 Bartholméss, Christian, 226 Barton, Charles, 143 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 136, 253 Beddoes, Thomas, 34, 43, 210, 211, 216 Beiser, Frederick, 26

Benecke, Georg Friedrich, 66 Benjamin, Walter, 260 Bentham, Jeremy, 245 Berkeley, George, 151, 249 Berlin, 16–18, 24, 38, 43, 47, 65, 74, 88, 91, 106, 119–129, 131–136, 139, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 167, 178, 184, 187, 191–193, 217, 220, 221, 238, 243, 244, 247, 263–265, 289, 298 Bildung, 238, 242 biology, 208, 217, 219, 222, 223, 230, 252 Biswas, Robindra, 160 Bithell, Richard, 229 Blackwood, William, 67, 68 Blakesley, Joseph Williams, 143 Blake, William, 36, 49, 164, 166 Blanchot, Maurice, 93, 292 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 294 The Secret Doctrine, 294 Bloom, Harold, 6, 26 The Anxiety of Influence, 6 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 57, 211 Institutiones physiologicae, 57 Böhme, Jakob, 4, 5, 8–11, 27, 49, 51, 114, 166 Böhmer, Auguste, 210 Bois-Reymond, Emil du, 167, 244 Boisserée, Sulpiz, 77 Bonald, Louis de, 88 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 45, 120 Boosey, Thomas, 51, 57, 217, 259 Bosanquet, Bernard, 280–282, 285 A History of Æesthetic, 280 The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, 280 Böttiger, Karl August, 45 Bouterwek, Friedrich, 244 Bowie, Andrew, 22, 290 Bradley, A.C., 20, 280

Index

Bradley, F.H., 20 Brande, William Thomas Dictionary of Science, Literature and Art, 197 Brandis, Christian August, 68 Brentano, Christian, 40 Brentano, Clemens, 40 Brentano, Franz, 40 Brewster, David, 66 Bridgwater, Patrick, 166 Bristol, 63, 210, 211 British idealism, 19, 20, 25, 27, 130, 199, 237, 245, 246, 248–252, 280, 299 Broad Church movement, 23, 158, 178, 182, 183, 186, 189, 226, 229 Brockhaus, Hermann, 263 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 246 Browning, Robert, 162, 184 ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, 163 Brown, John, 35, 36, 209, 210 Elementa Medicinae, 209, 210 Brown, Thomas, 64, 66, 73, 91, 225 Bruno, Giordano, 8, 148, 277, 284 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 156, 162 Poems and Ballads of Schiller, 162 Bunsen, Christian, 120, 122, 129– 131, 140, 158, 184, 185, 193, 201, 264–266 Ägyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, 201, 266 Bunsen, Henry, 129 Bunsen, Karl, 130 Burke, Edmund, 41 Burkhardt, Jakob, 16, 121 Burnouf, Eugène, 265 Butler, Charles, 34, 56 Butler, George, 56 Butler, Samuel, 292 Unconscious Memory, 292 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 46, 47, 50, 105, 123

  305

C Caird, Edward, 19, 130, 199, 249, 250, 274 The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 250 ‘Goethe and Philosophy’, 249 Caird, John, 199, 249 Cairns, John, 24, 178, 191–193 hears Schelling lecture, 178, 193 Calderwood, Henry, 91, 242 The Philosophy of the Infinite, 242 Calvinism, 188, 190, 241 Cambridge, 25, 139, 140, 143, 147, 163, 165, 185, 220, 237, 239, 244, 245 Cambridge Apostles, 143, 144, 165, 237 Campbell, John McLeod, 190, 241 Caneva, Kenneth L., 208 Carlyle, John, 15, 17, 75–79, 87, 92 meets Schelling, 75, 76 Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 15, 19, 24, 45, 71–80, 82, 84, 86–88, 91, 92, 101, 109, 111, 140, 144, 150, 157, 163, 182, 190, 192, 223, 241, 246, 294, 296, 298 German Romance, 91 Heroes and Hero-Worship, 79 Life of Schiller, 75, 92 meets Schelling, 79 ‘Novalis’, 86 Past and Present, 79, 92 Sartor Resartus, 24, 80–88, 93, 106, 157, 161, 192, 243, 248, 296 ‘The State of German Literature’, 74, 75, 77, 78, 91 Carus, Carl Gustav, 208, 213, 215, 218 Lehrbuch der Zootomie, 218 Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochenund Schalengerüstes, 219

306  Index Case, Thomas, 248 Catholicism, 23, 39, 53, 54, 86, 149, 163, 184, 185, 187–189, 195, 198, 252, 262 Chalybäus, Heinrich Moritz Historische Entwicklung der spekulativen Philosophie, 187 Chandler, Henry William, 224 Chapman, John, 150, 151, 153, 183, 231, 283 chemistry, 150, 151, 153, 183, 231, 283 Chopin, Frédéric, 190 Clarke, James Freeman, 194 Class, Monika, 23, 49, 90 Claus, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Grundzüge der Zoölogie, 231 Cleasby, Richard, 145–147 meets Schelling, 145–147 Clifford, William Kingdon, 168 Cline, Henry, 217 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 132, 159–162, 246 Dipsychus, 161, 167 Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, 264 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 105 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3–12, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26, 33, 34, 49–57, 63, 68, 70, 77, 83, 90, 99–114, 132, 141, 142, 148, 150, 151, 158, 164, 165, 177–180, 182–184, 190, 195, 200, 208–213, 215–219, 221, 247, 259–261, 271, 273, 274, 291, 292, 296–298 Aids to Reflection, 179, 182, 260 Biographia Literaria, 3–11, 49–55, 63, 70, 102, 108–112, 114, 178, 179, 181, 213, 261 Collected Works, 259 Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, 179

lectures on Schelling, 53 letters, 51, 52, 54, 57, 179, 180, 213, 214, 216, 217, 259 ‘Logosophia’, 7, 54 Magnum Opus, 7, 54, 178, 179 marginalia, 52, 53, 56–58, 90, 114, 181, 282 notebooks, 51, 53, 179, 180, 182, 209, 214, 216, 260 ‘On the Error of Schelling’s Philosophy’, 200 ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, 17, 259, 291, 297 ‘On Poesy or Art’, 55 ‘On the Trinity’, 181 Opus Maximus, 54, 108, 218 plagiarism, 3, 7, 11, 12, 17, 20, 24, 49–51, 99–107, 109–114, 132, 139, 142, 167, 261, 274, 298 Table Talk, 105 The Friend, 211 Theory of Life, 213, 214, 218, 297 Coleridge, Sara, 110 Collier, John Dyer, 43 Collins, Wilkie, 57 Colquhoun, John Campbell, 66 Combe, George, 75 common sense philosophy, 64, 74, 90, 107, 223, 298 Comte, August, 195, 228 Condillac, Étienne, 64 Constant, Benjamin, 45–47, 271, 272, 298 Cottle, Joseph, 210 Coupland, William Chatterton, 168, 292 Cousin, Victor, 14, 65, 68, 76, 77, 89, 148–150 Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie, 159 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 159, 260

Index

D Darwin, Charles, 25, 66, 168, 208, 216, 220, 222, 223, 252, 253, 284, 293, 299 Journal of Researches, 220 The Origin of Species, 220, 222 Darwin, Erasmus, 41, 216 The Botanic Garden, 216 Zoonomia, 230 Davidson, Samuel, 193 hears Schelling lecture, 193 Sacred Hermeneutics, 193 Davy, Humphry, 24, 208, 209, 211–213, 216, 222, 299 Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, 211 Deleuze, Gilles, 93, 296–298 and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, 300 Derrida, Jacques, 27, 269, 291 La carte postale, 27 Dibble, Jerry, 71, 81 Dickens, Charles, 57, 109, 248 difference, 82, 214, 297, 298 Digby, Kenelm, 148 Dilke, Emilia (Mrs. Mark Pattison) The Renaissance of Art in France, 283 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 13 Ding-an-sich, 69, 80, 162 Dionysus, 276, 284 Disraeli, Benjamin, 196 Vivian Grey, 196 Dissenters, 23, 39, 189–191, 193, 195, 243 Domett, Alfred, 163 Ranolf and Amohia, 163 Donne, William Bodham, 143 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 300 Duncan, Andrew, 66 Dynamik (dynamics), 208, 211, 214, 219

  307

E Eckhart, Meister, 166 ecology, 298 Edgeworth, Francis Beaufort, 221 Edinburgh, 25, 64–66, 74, 75, 81, 91, 101, 106, 108, 145, 182, 191, 192, 237, 242, 243, 245, 246 Edward VII (Albert Edward), 127 Eichhorn, Karl Friedrich, 34, 184 Eichthal, David von, 77 Einbildungskraft. See imagination electricity, 35, 207, 213, 215, 222 Eliot, George, 12, 24, 153–155, 177 Eliot, T.S., 20 Elliotson, John, 57 Ellis, Robert Leslie, 221 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 46, 135, 141, 294 empiricism, 36, 41, 43, 151, 216, 237 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 64, 219, 242, 249 Encyclopédie des gens du monde, 169 Engels, Friedrich, 16, 92, 119, 121, 122, 150, 151, 290 Ense, Karl August Varnhagen von, 144, 154, 245 Tagebücher, 169 epicureanism, 187, 250, 253 Erdmann, Johann Eduard, 192 Erskine, Thomas of Linlathen, 190, 241 meets Schelling, 190 Eschenmayer, Karl August, 38, 39 Natur-Metaphysik, 209 Essays and Reviews (Jowett, Pattison, Powell, Temple, Williams and Wilson), 130, 177, 182 Evans, Marion. See Eliot, George evolutionary theory, 168, 216, 220, 223, 253, 269, 293, 299. See also archetypes; homology; transcendental morphology existentialism, 21

308  Index F Fairbairn, Andrew Martin, 196 Fallersleben, August Heinrich Hoffmann von, 127 Faraday, Michael, 157, 208, 209, 212, 216, 222, 299 Ferrier, James Frederick, 50, 55, 106–110, 132, 179, 180, 192, 223, 246, 298 ‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness’, 107 Institutes of Metaphysics, 107 ‘The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge’, 107 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 122 Das Wesen Christenthums, 153 Fichte, Immanuel Hermann, 191, 225 Grundzüge zum Systeme der Philosophie, 201 Zur Seelenfrage, 225 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 13, 19, 22, 35–37, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 79–88, 90, 93, 101, 102, 107, 112, 114, 126, 144, 151, 155, 157, 165, 166, 183, 192, 222, 225, 238, 239, 275 Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 52, 92 Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, 52, 77, 81, 83, 86, 87 Fischer, Otokar, 19 Flügel, Eward, 72 force (Kraft), 129, 134, 209, 212, 213, 215, 219, 229, 278, 280, 290, 296, 297 Fourier, Charles, 134 Fox, Caroline, 50, 144, 221, 228 Fox, William Johnson, 155 France and the French reception of Schelling, 21, 28, 45, 64, 72, 148, 158, 159, 226

Frank, Manfred, 21 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 91, 165, 242, 253 Frederick William III, 120 Frederick William IV, 24, 119, 120, 122–130, 135 freedom, 13, 40, 44, 177, 180, 199, 273, 277, 295 Frege, Gottlob, 21 Friedman, Michael, 212 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 150 French Revolution, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 2, 5–9, 11, 12, 25, 27, 40, 168, 294–296 ‘Das Unheimliche’, 1, 5, 295 Die Traumdeutung, 295 Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 11 Selbstdarstellung, 6, 295 Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 38–40 Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling, 38 Fruman, Norman, 100 Fuller, Margaret, 135 Furnivall, Frederick James, 162 G Gabler, Johann Philipp, 134 Gautier, Théophile, 271 Geddes, Alexander, 34 Gérando, Joseph Marie de, 64, 65, 88 Gesenius, Wilhelm, 135 Gieseler, Johann, 193 Gillies, Robert Pearce, 66, 101 Gissing, George, 166, 167 Workers in the Dawn, 166, 167 Gladstone, William Ewart, 2, 195, 196, 201, 271, 283 Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, 270 The State in its Relations with the Church, 195 Glasgow, 19, 25, 143, 225, 249, 250

Index

Gley, Gérard, 88 Godwin, William, 211 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 40, 46, 78, 92, 123, 139, 148, 150, 159, 201, 220, 221, 249 Faust, 84 Hermann and Dorothea, 231 Metamorphose der Pflanzen, 82, 220 Golubinski, Fyodor, 133 Goodsir, Joseph, 201 Gostwich, Joseph, 201 Grant, Alexander, 132 Grant, Iain Hamilton, 298, 300 Greece, ancient, 2, 258, 259, 262, 270, 274–276, 285, 291, 292 Green, Joseph Henry, 24, 49, 53, 55, 179, 180, 200, 208, 213, 217–219, 299 Spiritual Philosophy, 217 Vital Dynamics, 218 Green, Thomas Hill, 91, 130, 199, 245, 248–251, 253, 274, 280 Prolegomena to Ethics, 249, 251 Grimblot, Paul, 158 Grimm, Jakob, 146, 262 Deutsche Mythologie, 201 Grimm, Wilhelm, 146 Grote, George, 243, 245, 253 Grote, Harriet, 245 Grote, John, 245, 253 Grote, Selina, 245 Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze, Gilles Guyon, Jeanne, 166 H Habermas, Jürgen, 21 Haeckel, Ernst, 223 Haldane, Richard Burdon, 25 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 143–145 Hamann, Johann Georg, 148 Hamilton, Paul, 9, 49, 51–53, 261, 282

  309

Hamilton, William, 12, 24, 25, 63–71, 74, 75, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 99, 101, 106, 109, 112, 113, 145, 150, 157, 166, 190–192, 223–228, 237, 242, 245, 246, 249, 252, 253, 298 Dissertation, 109 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, 69 ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’, 67–71, 83, 87, 157, 208, 223, 229 Hamilton, William Rowan, 221 Handley, Edwin Hill, 147, 148 Hardenberg, Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von. See Novalis Harding, Anthony John, 180 Hardinge, William Money, 283 Hardy, Thomas, 167, 168, 292, 296 The Woodlanders, 168 Hare, Augustus William, 141, 158, 238 Hare, Julius Charles, 15, 17, 49, 104, 105, 107, 110, 111, 129, 139–145, 158, 161, 162, 178, 182, 183, 197, 200, 220, 221, 227, 237, 238, 241, 264, 265 Guesses at Truth (with Augustus Hare), 141, 142, 158, 161, 162, 169 meets Schelling, 104 Mission of the Comforter, 183 ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Opium-Eater’, 139, 142 Hare-Naylor, Francis, 139 Theodore, or, The Enthusiast, 139 Harrison, Robert, 201 Harrold, C.F., 71–73 Hartley, David, 193 Hartmann, Eduard von, 168, 229, 292, 293, 295 Philosophie des Unbewussten, 168, 292

310  Index Haxthausen, August von, 133 Haym, Rudolf, 245, 247 Hazlitt, William, 63, 66 Head, Edmund Walker, 141, 142, 161, 162 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 13–16, 19–25, 28, 36–38, 43, 49, 71, 72, 74, 87, 88, 90–92, 107, 111, 119, 120, 122, 124–128, 131, 133, 141, 151, 154, 155, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, 169, 184, 222, 223, 228, 237, 239, 246, 247, 249–253, 272, 280–282, 289, 290, 297, 299 Ästhetik, 280 Die Naturphilosophie, 121, 135 Differenzschrift (Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie), 14, 36, 92 Logik, 251 Phänomenologie des Geistes, 15, 89, 93, 120, 289 Philosophie der Religion, 253 Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 153 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 14, 21, 83, 296 Heine, Heinrich, 274, 283 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 167 Henderson, James Scot, 157 Henning, Leopold von, 124, 134 henotheism, 268, 283 Heraclitus, 279 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 159, 199 Hermann, Johann Gottfried Jakob, 65 hermeneutics, 2, 13, 25, 193 Herschel, Frederick William, 157 Herschel, John, 223 Heywood, James, 238, 239 Hirsch, E.D., 50 Hodgson, Francis, 47 Hodgson, James Muscutt, 229

Hogarth, William, 229 Hogg, James, 67, 106 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 14, 120, 257, 282 ‘Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus’, 282 Homer, 1, 270, 281, 285 Homeric hymns, 1 homology, 219. See also archetypes; evolutionary theory Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 131 Hoppus, John, 243, 244 The Continent in 1835, 243 The Crisis of Popular Education, 244 Horn, Franz, 78 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 154 Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 230 Hugo, Victor, 148 Humboldt, Alexander von, 16, 123, 130, 144, 159, 220, 221, 238, 264 Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, 220 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 38, 238 Hume, David, 64, 73, 107, 151 Hunter, John, 217 Hunt, John, 128 Hunt, Leigh, 128, 154 Husserl, Edmund, 40 Huxley, Thomas, 223 I idealism, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 28, 37, 48, 50, 51, 65, 71, 73, 79, 80, 102, 154, 156, 157, 186, 195, 225, 228, 230, 244–249, 271, 280, 282. See also British idealism; kritische Philosophie Identitätsphilosophie, 13–15, 17, 65, 73, 165, 186, 190, 207, 294, 295 imagination, 13–15, 17, 65, 73, 165, 186, 190, 207, 294, 295

Index

Indifferenz (indifference), 24, 70, 71, 81–83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 157, 161, 164, 208, 214, 225, 250, 277 influence, anxiety of, 6, 9–11, 26, 27, 104, 114 Ingleby, Clement Mansfield, 113, 114 Inman, Billie Andrew, 276, 284 Ireland and the Irish reception of Schelling, 193, 221, 262 Irving, Edward, 241 Irving, Washington, 74 J Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 57, 120 Jameson, Robert, 66 James Sr., William, 25, 294 James, William, 25, 294, 295 A Pluralistic Universe, 295, 297 The Varieties of Religion Experience, 294 Jamieson, John, 66, 89 Jaspers, Karl, 21 Jeffrey, Francis, 66, 67, 71, 74, 101 Jena, 8, 14, 16, 24, 34, 36–40, 42–45, 49, 51, 56, 57, 77, 92, 120, 132, 134, 146, 151, 210, 216, 220, 271 Jessop, Ralph, 75 Jevons, William Stanley, 242 Johnson, Andrew, 24, 150–154, 158, 159, 271 Johnson, Arthur, 18, 151, 152 Johnson, Samuel, 41, 55 Johnston, James, 283 Jones, William, 264 journalism, 24, 66, 122, 125, 157. See also periodicals Jowett, Benjamin, 12, 16–18, 24, 129–134, 136, 139, 156, 160, 182, 225, 239, 243, 245, 248–251, 265, 271, 274, 283 Dialogues of Plato, 130 Epistles of St. Paul, 130, 136

  311

meets Schelling, 131, 132 Joyce, James, 278 Julius, Nikolaus Heinrich, 91 Junghegelianer, 16, 125, 128 K Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 13, 19–21, 23, 34, 37, 40, 43–52, 54, 63, 64, 68–73, 76, 79, 80, 88, 90, 101, 107, 112, 151, 155, 162, 165, 166, 187, 199, 209–212, 215, 218, 221–225, 238, 239, 245, 246, 249, 250, 253, 289. See also kritische Philosophie De mundi sensibilis, 70, 88 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 26, 69, 72, 159 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, 209 Vermischte Schriften, 217 Kapp, Christian, 136 Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 47 Keats, John, 50, 57 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 50 Keble, John, 184, 198 Keightley, Thomas, 262, 263, 282 Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, 262 The Fairy Mythology, 262 Kemble, John Mitchell, 143–145, 147 meets Schelling, 143 Kepler, Johannes, 239 Kestner, August, 265 Khomyakov, Aleksey, 188 Kierkegaard, Søren, 16, 121, 131, 290 Kingsley, Charles, 182, 241 Alexandria and her Schools, 182 Klein, Georg Michael, 155, 157, 169 Beiträge zum Studium der Philosophie als Wissenschaft des All, 155

312  Index Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich, 170 Nachtwachen, 167, 296 Knox, Robert, 215 Kojève, Alexandre, 28 Kooy, Michael John, 100 Köppen, Friedrich, 38 Krell, David Farrell, 22, 27, 296 kritische Philosophie, 34, 37, 43, 46 Kuhn, Thomas, 208 L Lacan, Jacques, 22, 291, 292 Lamb, Caroline, 47 Lamb, Charles, 36, 92, 101 Lamb, William, 47 Lamennais, Hugues-Félicité Robert de, 189 Landor, Walter Savage, 140 meets Schelling, 140 Lang, Andrew, 276, 293, 300 language, 76, 194, 215, 219, 223, 253, 265, 268–270, 283, 284, 291 Lawrence, William, 218 Lecky, William History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 201 Legh, Peter The Music of the Eye, 46 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 76, 151 Levere, Trever H., 212 Lewes, George Henry, 12, 16, 17, 24, 135, 144, 151, 153–158, 160, 169, 226 Biographical History of Philosophy, 156–158, 169 ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics’, 154, 155 ‘Spinoza’s Life and Works’, 155, 156 ‘The Student’, 154

Liddon, Henry Parry, 178, 184, 198, 201 Lingen, Ralph Robert Wheeler, 133 Livingston, James C., 229, 232 Lloyd, Dorothea, 221 Lloyd, Humphrey, 221 Locke, John, 41, 54, 64, 151, 193, 216 Lockhart, John Gibson, 65, 67, 74, 89, 106 Logan, H.F.C., 221 London, 17, 25, 38, 49, 54, 55, 63, 66, 67, 90, 124, 129, 150, 154–156, 211, 215, 217, 231, 237, 241–244, 259, 262, 264, 265, 293 London University, 242–246 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 163 Lotze, Hermann, 167, 199, 242, 253, 263 Grundzüge der Religionsphilosophie, 199 Mikrokosmus, 199 Lowes, John Livingston, 113 Lücke, Friedrich, 265 Ludwig I of Bavaria, 78 Lushington, Edmund Law, 143–145, 155, 157, 197 M Mackintosh, James, 48, 64, 66, 148 Maecenas, Gaius, 123 magnetism, 35, 82, 157, 164, 207, 213, 215, 222 Maistre, Joseph de, 184, 221 Manchester, 25, 79, 157, 166, 190, 193, 194, 237, 241, 242. See also Owens College, Manchester Man, Paul de, 20, 260 Mansel, Henry Longueville, 25, 163, 198, 200, 223–228, 252, 299 Metaphysics, 226 ‘Modern German Philosophy’, 231

Index

Phrontisterion, 224, 239, 245, 266 Prolegomena Logica, 224 The Limits of Religious Thought, 198, 200, 224, 226, 245 March Revolution, 17, 125, 151 Maria of Austria, 127 Martineau, James, 24, 178, 194, 195, 199, 239, 242, 253 ‘Personal Influences on our Present Theology’, 195 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 195 Study of Religion, 195 Study of Spinoza, 195 Marx, Karl, 122, 124, 125, 136, 150, 151 Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon, 120 Massmann, Hans Ferdinand, 146 Masson, David, 246, 248 Recent British Philosophy, 246 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 140, 143, 178, 182–184, 190, 199, 226, 227, 241 Modern Philosophy, 16, 183 Theological Essays, 184 What is Revelation?, 227 Maximilian II, 127 McCosh, James, 64, 68 McFarland, Thomas, 11, 100 McGrath, F.C., 272, 273, 283 medicine, 35, 36, 50, 56, 57, 66, 210, 215 Medwin, Thomas, 123–126, 134 Lady Singleton, 123, 167 melancholia (Schwermut), 161, 167, 273, 277, 296 Mendelssohn, Felix, 147 Menzel, Wolfgang, 150 Merivale, Charles, 197 Merivale, John Herman, 105 mesmerism, 293 Meusel, Johann Georg, 34 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 123

  313

Michelet, Karl Ludwig, 121, 135, 144 Geschichte der Letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel, 155 Mignet, François Auguste Alexis, 148 Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de m. de Schelling, 169 Mill, James, 64, 228, 243 Mill, John Stuart, 67, 140, 199, 228, 229, 243, 245, 246, 253 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 68, 228, 253 System of Logic, 228 Mill, William Hodge, 145, 155, 196, 197, 244 Observations on the attempted application of pantheistic principles to the theory and historic criticism of the Gospel, 145, 196 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 144 meets Schelling, 144 Milton, John, 6, 90, 182 Mitchell, Robert, 73 modernism, 278, 294, 299 Möhler, Johann Adam Symbolik, 149 Molitor, Franz Joseph, 149 Monsman, Gerald, 275 Moore, George Edward, 28 Morell, John Daniel, 194, 225, 226 Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 194, 225 Morgan, Ella S., 238 Morton, Timothy, 298 Muirhead, John Henry, 19, 21 Coleridge as Philosopher, 28 ‘How Hegel Came to England’, 19 Müller, Johannes Peter, 284 Müller, Karl Otfried, 262 Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, 282

314  Index Müller, Max, 12, 18, 25, 253, 263, 264, 266–271, 276, 283, 290, 291, 294, 299 ‘Greek Mythology’, 267 meets Schelling, 263 ‘Semetic Monotheism’, 268 The Science of Religion, 284 Müller, Wilhelm, 263 Munich, 14, 15, 17, 43, 75, 77, 79, 87, 120, 122–124, 134, 140, 141, 145–148, 158, 183, 188, 228, 238, 265, 298 Murray, John, 47, 67 mysticism, 20, 22, 39, 41, 50, 65, 70, 71, 79, 99, 123, 124, 131, 158, 159, 184, 186, 188, 215, 225, 246, 252, 262, 268, 274, 295 mythology, 15, 16, 18, 25, 42, 65, 78, 79, 134, 146, 193, 197, 250, 252, 257–271, 276, 281, 290, 291, 294, 298, 299 N Nachtwachen (Bonaventura). See Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich Napier, Macvey, 66, 67, 74, 89, 91 nature, 13, 35, 39, 47, 82–85, 88, 133, 142, 144, 151, 154, 155, 164, 165, 168, 179, 180, 207, 211, 212, 214–216, 218, 219, 224, 243, 252, 268, 270, 273, 275, 277–279, 284, 293, 296 Naturphilosophie, 7, 13, 14, 17, 22–24, 35, 37, 40, 45, 48, 53, 73, 82, 84, 93, 141, 152, 154, 157, 177, 179, 180, 185, 186, 196, 200, 207–215, 217, 218, 220, 222, 225, 227, 228, 231, 246, 249, 273, 274, 279, 281, 284, 295–298, 300

Neander, August, 130, 184, 192, 193 negative philosophy, 13, 122, 289, 290 Nelson, John, 191 Nelson, William, 191 Nettleship, Richard Lewis, 280 Neuberg, Joseph, 79 Newman, John Henry, 130, 149, 163, 184, 187, 188, 198, 241 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 187 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 187 Newton, Isaac, 43, 157, 239 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 140, 158 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel, 69 Nietzsche, Freidrich, 6, 7, 10, 250 Die Geburt der Tragödie, 250 Ecce Homo, 10 Nightingale, Florence, 130 Nitsch, Friedrich August, 90 ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ (Lockhart, Hogg, Wilson et al.), 67, 106 Noel, Roden, 164–166 ‘Melcha’, 166 ‘Mencheres – A Vision of Old Egypt’, 165 Norman, Judith, 291 Norton, Andrews, 105 Norton, Charles Eliot, 105 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 78, 81, 84, 86, 93, 225 Die Christenheit oder Europa, 86 O object orientated ontology, 298 Oken, Lorenz, 146, 208, 215, 218, 219, 222, 224 Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 215, 219, 225

Index

Old Mortality Society, 254, 274 Ontyd, Conrad George, 35, 57 Ørsted, Hans Christian, 125, 209, 213, 216, 222, 230 Owen, Richard, 24, 208, 216–220, 222, 223, 284, 299 ‘On the Archetype’, 219 On the Nature of Limbs, 219 Owens College, Manchester, 25, 166, 241, 242 Oxford, 25, 65, 91, 129, 130, 132, 133, 141, 151, 154, 158, 184, 188, 198, 200, 224, 225, 227, 237–240, 243, 245, 248–250, 252, 254, 265, 271, 274, 275, 278, 280, 283, 295, 299 P Palgrave, Francis Turner, 133, 271 Palmer, William, 188 Appeal to the Scottish Bishops and Clergy, 188 pantheism, 5, 26, 44, 48, 53, 54, 84, 85, 92, 145, 150, 155, 157, 165, 177–180, 185, 187, 192, 195–200, 215, 216, 223, 243, 244, 249, 274, 277, 293 Pantheismusstreit, 5, 26, 58 Parker, Theodore, 135, 226 hears Schelling lecture, 135 Pater, Clara, 294 Pater, Walter, 13, 18, 25, 130, 162, 252, 254, 271–279, 281, 284, 289–292, 294, 299 ‘Apollo in Picardy’, 276, 290 ‘A Study of Dionysus’, 276 ‘Coleridge’, 11, 27, 36, 273, 274, 278 ‘Diaphaneitè’, 274, 278 Gaston de Latour, 276, 278 ‘Giordano Bruno’, 277

  315

‘History of Philosophy’, 54, 284, 289, 290 Marius the Epicurean, 254 ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, 276 ‘Poems of William Morris’, 278 Plato and Platonism, 284, 300 ‘Prosper Mérimée’, 289 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 254, 278, 279, 281, 295, 296 Patmore, Coventry, 152, 153 ‘Ethics of Art’, 153 reviews Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, 152 Pattison, Mark, 182, 283 Paul, Jean (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 81, 167 Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 16–18, 33, 34, 131, 136, 150, 183 and Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung, 16 Memorabilen, 33, 257 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 294, 295, 300 Peisse, Louis, 68 Pellico, Silvio, 127 periodicals, 24, 33–39, 56, 122, 123, 125–127, 154, 298 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 38, 156 Athenæum, The, 56, 123, 124, 126, 127 Bibliotheca Sacra, 156 Blackwood’s Magazine, 67, 75, 106, 107 British and Foreign Review, The, 145, 154 British Critic, 33, 48, 257 British Magazine, 104, 188 Christian Teacher, The, 194 Classical Review, 17, 258, 259

316  Index Contemporary Review, 158, 249 Critic, The, 79, 152 Dial, The, 135 Eclectic Review, The, 149 Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 36, 215 Edinburgh Review, 34, 48, 63, 65–67, 74, 75, 77, 78, 91, 105, 220 Examiner, The, 127, 128 Foreign Quarterly Review, 91, 134, 156 Fortnightly Review, 112, 158, 277 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 125 Hallischen Jahrbücher, 122, 124, 135, 141 Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (Marcus and Schelling), 155, 157, 281 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 238 Kritische Journal der Philosophie, Das (Hegel and Schelling), 37 Leader, The, 135 Light, 293 Literary Gazette, The, 122 London Phalanx, The, 134 Macmillan’s Magazine, 246 Medical and Physical Journal, 35 Memorabilen, 33, 257 Mind, 244 Monthly Magazine, The, 34, 36–39, 43, 57, 210, 294 Monthly Register and Encyclopedian Magazine, The, 43, 46, 238 Monthly Review, The, 34, 48, 210, 238 New Annual Register, 35 Pall Mall Gazette, 292, 293 Penny Satirist, 217 Philological Museum, The, 141, 161

Philosophische Journal (Fichte and Niethammer), 69 Quarterly Review, 67 Revue des Deux Mondes, 159 Scots Magazine, The, 35 Spectator, The, 128 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 101 Times, The, 123, 125–127 Universal Magazine, 38 Westminster Review, The, 150, 153, 155, 157, 273, 278, 283 Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik (Gabler and Schelling), 36, 37, 40, 157, 207 permanence (Permanenz), 278 Pfleiderer, Otto, 199, 200 Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlichen Grundlage, 199 The Development of Theology since Kant, 199 phenomenology, 21 philology, 65, 143, 145, 146, 149, 258, 265, 266 physics, 35, 40, 209, 213, 221, 252, 295, 296 pietism, 124, 134, 135 Pius IX (Pope), 198 plagiarism, 3, 7, 11, 17, 20, 24, 39, 50, 99–111, 113, 114, 133, 139, 142, 167, 201, 211, 261, 274 Platen, Graf (August Georg Maximilian Graf von PlatenHallermünde), 78 Plato, 41, 42, 130, 185, 243 Plitt, Gustav Leopold, 170 Aus Schellings Leben, 158 Plotinus, 54, 159, 160, 243 Plumptre, Constance General Sketch of the History of Pantheism, 197, 201 Plutarch, 90, 159, 276

Index

poetry, 37, 55, 70, 78, 106, 111–113, 142, 147, 149, 158, 159, 161– 165, 168, 169, 199, 210–212, 257, 259, 261, 273, 276, 280, 292 Polarität (polarity), 82, 164, 179, 208, 213–216, 225, 231 politics Austrian, 125 Bavarian, 78 British, 66, 67, 74, 75, 125, 126, 128, 135, 196, 224, 239, 243, 245 in Jena, 38, 56 Prussian, 17, 24, 119–122, 124– 128, 130, 131, 134, 135, 141, 298 Poole, Thomas, 101, 102, 106, 114, 210 Pope, Alexander, 216 positive philosophy, 13, 15, 17, 22, 71, 78, 122, 131, 134, 144, 152, 158, 177, 178, 180, 183, 200, 207, 213, 227, 246, 251, 258, 267, 289–291, 298 positivism, 195, 237 poststructuralism, 21, 22, 86, 291 Potenz (potency), 53, 181, 297 Pott, Davide Julio, 34 Powell, Baden, 238, 239 Prati, Gioacchino, 217 Preller, Ludwig, 276 Prévost, Pierre, 88 Priestley, Joseph, 40, 41, 44 process theology, 180 Proclus, 54 psychoanalysis, 6, 21, 22, 25, 113, 291, 294, 295, 299 pulses (Pulsieren), 279, 295, 297 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 129, 184– 187, 198, 201, 240, 241 An Historical Enquiry Into the Probable Causes of the

  317

Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany, 185–187, 240 Collegiate and Professorial Teaching and Discipline, 240 Q Quincey, Thomas de, 3, 11, 24, 49, 101–108, 111–114, 169, 246, 298 Autobiographic Sketches, 101, 102, 108 Confessions of an English OpiumEater, 101 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 21 R Rajan, Tilottama, 22 Ranke, Leopold von, 130 Rattray, John, 192 Raumer, Friedrich von, 124, 134 Reeve, Henry, 147–150 Graphidae, or, Characteristics of Painters, 149 hears Schelling, 147 Reich, Gottfried Christian, 230 Reid, Thomas, 64, 73, 90, 99, 107, 109 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 89 religion, 1, 39, 40, 53, 78, 81, 86, 120, 122, 126, 128, 131, 134, 170, 186, 208, 227, 232, 262–264, 267–270, 275, 276, 283. See also agnosticism; Anglicanism; atheism; Calvinism; Catholicism; Dissenters; henotheism; pantheism; pietism; revelation; theology; theosophy; spiritualism; Tractarianism; Trinitarianism; Unitarianism; Vermittlungstheologie

318  Index Reubel, Josef, 39 revelation, 16, 92, 119, 122, 133, 144, 146, 178, 183, 188, 193, 197, 227, 229, 232, 244, 251, 258, 261, 298 Richardson, David Lester, 111 Richards, Robert J., 219, 220, 222 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich. See Paul, Jean Rigg, James Harrison, 182, 223 Modern Anglican Theology, 182 Rigveda, 263, 265, 266 Rintoul, Robert Stephen, 128 Rio, Alexis-François, 148, 189, 221 De la poésie chrétienne, 189 Epilogue à l’art chrétien, 189 Ripley, George, 194 Ritchie, David George, 74, 91 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 209, 212 Robberds, John Gooch, 194, 242 Roberts, Morley, 166 The Private Life of Henry Maitland The Private Life of Henry Maitland, 166 ‘The Reputation of George Saxon’, 166 Robertson, George Croom, 244 Robertson, James Burton, 149 Robertson, John Mackinnon, 113 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 12, 14, 23, 33, 39, 41–47, 49, 51, 56, 57, 77, 80, 92, 139, 140, 151, 158, 179, 184, 216, 238, 241, 245, 271, 272, 298 ‘Letters from an Under-Graduate, at the University of Jena’, 43 ‘On the German Aesthetick’, 46, 47, 271 ‘On the Philosophy of Schelling’, 46, 47 ‘The Origin of the Idea of Cause’, 43 ‘Über die ffreyheit & Nothwendigkeit’, 44

meets Schelling in Carlsbad, 78, 184 meets Schelling in Jena, 41, 42 Reminiscences, 42, 43, 45, 46, 57 Romanticism, 12, 16, 17, 19–25, 33, 36, 40, 47–49, 56, 63, 64, 66, 82, 92, 99, 100, 120, 128, 132, 139, 145, 158, 178, 184, 193, 199, 209, 217, 229, 237, 252, 258, 261, 263, 268, 271, 281, 295, 298 Rome, 54, 129, 140, 195, 198, 231 Röschlaub, Andreas, 209, 210 Rose, Hugh James, 187–189, 201, 220 The State of Protestantism in Germany, 185 Rossetti, Christina, 145 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 145 Rossetti, Gabriele, 145 Rothe, Richard, 185 Die Anfänge der christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, 185 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 144 Royce, Josiah, 195 Rozenkrantz, Karl Schelling, 156 Ruge, Arnold, 16, 121, 124 New Germany, 124 Runge, Friedlieb Ferdinand, 231 Ruskin, John, 189, 241 Modern Painters, 281 Russell, Bertrand, 21, 25, 28 History of Western Philosophy, 21 Russell, James, 192 Russell, John, 224, 239 Russia and the Russian reception of Schelling, 188 S Saisset, Émile, 159 Sanders, Daniel, 1, 295 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 43, 134, 238, 241

Index

scepticism, 69, 76 Schauroth, Delphine von, 147 Schelling, Caroline, 14, 210, 252 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph life and reception; in Berlin, 16, 17, 24, 38, 119–128, 131, 134, 135, 144, 147, 153, 156, 191, 193, 220, 240, 247, 260, 261, 263–265, 270, 274, 289, 298; in Carlsbad, 15, 184, 190, 245; described by British visitors, 41–43, 76, 77, 79, 131, 140, 156, 191; discusses British philosophy, 41–43, 77, 151, 216; discusses Coleridge, 17, 77, 78, 132, 190, 260, 261; discusses living in England, 146; discusses Thomas Arnold, 158, 265; discusses Thomas Carlyle, 77, 78, 190; English translations of, 18, 22, 24, 68, 148, 150, 158, 194, 271; in Erlangen, 15; in Jena, 14, 36, 37, 41–43, 77, 151, 216; meets Schelling, 264; in Munich, 14, 15, 17, 18, 75, 77–79, 120, 140, 143, 145–148, 178, 183, 188, 201, 238, 261, 265, 298; period of ‘silence’, 14–17, 107, 109, 178, 180; sense of humour, 53, 132; writing style, 222, 247, 267; in Würzburg, 14, 38 works; Abhandlung zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre, 14, 51, 109, 251; Akademierede (Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur), 24, 51, 55, 133, 141, 142, 149–153, 158, 159, 162, 271, 275, 281; Bruno oder über das göttliche

  319

und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge, 14, 69, 159, 160, 224, 226, 252, 277; Clara, 15, 293; ‘Darstellung des Systems meiner Philosophie’, 57, 91, 207; De Marcione Paulinarum epistolarum emendatore, 69; Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen des Herrn Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 51– 53, 56, 57, 69, 249; Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 155, 179, 200, 207, 217, 220, 251, 279; Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 14, 35, 71, 82, 83, 90, 210, 218, 220, 251, 278, 279, 294, 295; Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie, 90; Freiheitsschrift (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände), 2, 14, 44, 51, 70, 85, 145, 155, 167, 177, 180, 195, 199, 250, 273, 277, 283, 296; Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft, 14, 22, 35, 38, 51, 69, 70, 82, 112, 157, 213, 222, 245, 294; Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, 155, 281; Kritische Journal der Philosophie, Das, 14, 37; Methode (Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums), 38, 46, 51, 69, 71, 74, 78, 145, 150, 186, 193– 195, 198, 207, 210, 218, 221, 222, 226, 238, 251, 266, 275;

320  Index Philosophie der Kunst, 14, 46, 280; Philosophie der Mythologie, 1, 12, 16, 132, 196, 260, 261, 267, 269, 290, 297; Philosophie der Offenbarung, 16, 131, 183, 197, 200, 290; Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus, 14, 51, 69, 70, 83, 195; Philosophische Schriften, 51, 69, 74, 75, 82, 90, 104, 141, 245; Sämmtliche Werke, 16, 18, 27; Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, 283; System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, 140, 251; System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 4, 7, 14, 22, 51, 57, 93, 157, 158, 178, 195, 226, 249–252, 257, 258, 280, 281; Über das Verhältnis der Naturphilosophie zur philosophie überhaupt, 82; Über den wahren Begriff Naturphilosophie, 93; Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, 15–17, 177, 258, 259, 282, 292; Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt, 14; ‘Über Faraday’s neueste Entdeckung’, 207, 222; ‘Über Mythen, historische Sagen und Philosopheme der ältesten Welt’, 33, 257–259, 269; Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen, 14, 51, 69, 107, 226; Von der Weltseele, 75, 141, 210, 293; ‘Vorrede zu einer philosophischen Schrift des Herrn Victor Cousin’, 14, 145; Weltalter, 15–17, 27, 85, 114, 180, 213, 259, 290,

291; Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, 36, 37, 40, 91, 157, 207; Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 15, 27, 290 Schelling, Karl Friedrich, v, 16 Schiller, Friedrich, 139, 197 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 15, 47, 123, 146 Schlegel, Friedrich, 74, 78, 93, 230 Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur, 74 Philosophie der Geschichte, 149 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 13, 74, 131, 140, 160, 184, 186, 187, 193, 199, 201, 228, 230, 232, 238 Schmeller, Johann Andreas, 146 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 88, 166 Schröckh, Johann Matthias, 201 Schultze, Johannes, 120 Schulze, Ernst, 120 Schwabe, Christian Ernst, 34 Schwegler, Albert, 114 Schweighäuser, Johann Gottfried, 38, 39 science, 20, 24, 25, 34, 35, 47, 56, 65, 66, 120, 126, 142, 168, 186, 189, 207–210, 212, 214–216, 218, 221–224, 238, 239, 243, 252, 261, 273, 284, 295, 299. See also biology; chemistry; Dynamik; electricity; force; medicine; magnetism; physics Scott, Alexander John, 190, 241–243 Scotland and the Scottish reception of Schelling, 24, 35, 36, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 74, 76, 77, 80, 91, 99, 101, 103, 107, 113, 182, 188, 190–192, 215, 223, 241, 246, 249, 253, 298, 299 Scott, Walter, 64, 65, 67, 74, 129, 190 Seckendorf, Leo von, 120

Index

Sedgwick, Adam, 220, 231, 244 A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 244 Shaffer, Elinor, 23, 34 Shakespeare, William, 211, 240 Macbeth, 120, 240 Sharp, Richard, 48 Shelley, Mary, 50 Frankenstein, 124, 167 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 50, 123 Sibree, John, 153 Sibree, Mary, 153 Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred, 165, 169 Sidgwick, Henry, 165, 169 Sidgwick, Mrs. Arthur Caroline Schlegel and Her Friends, 170 Sidonskii, Fedor Fedorovich, 188 Sinnett, Alfred Percy, 293 Smith, Adam, 88 Smith, Henry Boynton, 156 Smith, James Elishama ‘Shepherd’, 134 Smith, Sydney, 66 Smith, William, 182 Socrates, 156 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, 217 Southey, Robert, 49 Curse of Kehama, 57 Spencer, Herbert, 165, 166, 168, 223, 253 Spinoza, Baruch, 26, 44, 47, 54, 65, 76, 153, 155, 157, 159, 166, 218 Ethica, 153 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 50, 153 spiritualism, 165, 293 Spix, Johann Baptist von, 215 Staël, Germaine de, 24, 33, 45–49, 56, 64, 148, 186, 271, 298 Corinne, ou L’Italie, 46 De l’Allemagne, 47–49, 88, 196

  321

Delphine, 47 Stallo, John Bernhard General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, 231 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 12, 16, 17, 24, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140, 156, 182, 224, 225, 239, 243, 245, 265 Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church, 133 Life of Thomas Arnold, 130–131 meets Schelling, 131–133, 245 Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age, 133 Stanley, Edward, 129 Stapfer, Philipp-Albert, 72–74, 91 Steffens, Henrik, 207, 211, 213, 230, 297 Stein, Karl von, 120 Sterling, John, 140, 143, 144, 182, 184, 228, 232, 282 Stewart, Dugald, 64–68, 73, 76, 88, 91, 243 Dissertation, 64, 88, 152, 156 Stewart, John ‘Walking’, 169 Stirling, James Hutchison, 111, 112, 114, 246–248 The Secret of Hegel, 111, 246–248, 251 Stirling, Jane, 190 Strauss, David Friedrich, 17, 74, 145, 160, 166, 196, 200 Das Leben Jesu, 153, 177 stream of consciousness, 278, 279, 284, 294, 295 Strutt, Benjamin, 42 Sully, James, 167, 242, 244, 253, 296 Pessimism, 167 Sunderland, Thomas, 143 Sweden, 146 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 213, 294 Swift, Jonathan, 70, 128

322  Index Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 274 symbol, 42, 82, 148, 149, 165, 260, 285. See also allegory; tautegory Symonds, John Addington, 133, 165, 275 T Talbot, George, 198 Tathandlung (act), 13, 52, 70, 81, 90 tautegory, 25, 132, 259–261. See also allegory; symbol Tautphoeus, Baroness Jemima von The Initials, 165, 170 Tayler, John James, 193, 194, 242 Religious Life of England, 193 Taylor, Thomas, 42 Taylor, William of Norwich, 34, 48, 148, 149 Tegnér, Esaias, 146 Temple, Henry John (Lord Palmerston), 64 Tennemann, Wilhelm Gottlieb, 152, 194 Geschichte der Philosophie, 151 Tennyson, Alfred, 143, 144, 147 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 57, 241 theology, 13, 17, 20, 23, 24, 39, 53, 55, 81, 119, 132–134, 136, 160, 163, 177–180, 182–200, 216, 223, 224, 226, 244, 261, 262, 273, 281, 293, 299. See also religion; Vermittlungstheologie theosophy, 50, 199, 293, 294 Thirlwall, Connop, 139–141, 143, 220, 221 Tholuck, August, 184 Thomasius, Gottfried, 15 Thom, John Hamilton, 193, 194, 242 Thomson, James, 164

Tieck, Ludwig, 74, 78, 79, 91, 93, 123, 124, 140, 144, 217, 230 Tilley, Elisabeth, 150 Tillich, Paul, 21, 177 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 147 Tomlinson, George, 143 Tractarianism, 130, 149, 184, 186, 188, 190, 198, 243 transcendental empiricism, 298 Transcendentalism, 18, 105, 135, 226, 300 transcendental morphology, 218, 284 Trench, Richard Chenevix, 143 Trinitarianism, 177, 178, 180 Tulk, Alfred, 219, 225 Tulk, Charles Augustus, 213–215, 219 Turner, J.M.W., 281 Twesten, August, 187 type. See archetypes U Uexküll, Jakob von, 296 Uhland, Ludwig, 78 Ulrici, Hermann, 253 uncanny, the (das unheimlich), 1–7, 9–12, 19, 20, 24–26, 53, 85, 88, 114, 164, 168, 181, 261, 291, 293, 298, 299 Unconditioned, the, 67–71, 83, 87, 90, 157, 208, 223, 225, 226, 229, 252 unconscious, the, 13, 25, 55, 70, 85, 142, 161, 168, 269, 291, 292, 294, 295, 299 Ungrund, das, 2, 13, 53, 85, 259, 269, 291, 293, 297, 299 Unitarianism, 40, 178, 179, 190, 193, 194, 199, 242 universities, 14–16, 19, 25, 34, 36–39, 43, 75, 80, 119, 122, 130, 143, 147, 149, 185, 196, 207,

Index

210, 211, 224, 228, 237–239, 241–245, 249, 263, 265, 275, 280, 284. See also individual cities by name British compared to German, 238–241 reform movement, 25, 130, 224, 238–240, 243 University College London. See London University Unruhe (unrest), 81, 85, 93 untimeliness, 2, 290, 291, 298, 299 Upton, Charles, 199, 201 Urbilder. See archetypes Urszene (primal scene), 3, 11, 12, 51, 292 utilitarianism, 76, 165, 237 V Vaughan, Henry Halford, 240, 241 Veitch, John, 66–68, 75, 89, 249 Venables, George Stovin, 145 Venetianer, Moritz Der Allgeist, 293 Vermittlungstheologie (mediation theology), 186 Vetruvius, 46 Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria), 34, 127, 129 Vida, Elizabeth, 72, 74, 82, 91, 92 Vigus, James, 23, 44, 46, 57, 272 Villers, Charles de, 45, 228 Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence de la réformation de Luther, 228 Voigt, Johann Heinrich, 40 Volta, Alessandro, 212 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 262, 282 W Wagner, Johann Jakob, 38, 39

  323

Wagner, Richard, 250 Wallace, Alexander, 191 Wallace, William, 130, 250–254, 275 Epicureanism, 250, 254 Kant, 250 Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy, 251–254 The Life of Arthur Schopenhauer, 250 The Logic and Prolegomena of Hegel, 250 Wallen, Martin, 213 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey Robert Elsmere, 200 Watson, John, 250 Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism, 250 Wedgwood, Josiah, 179 Weikard, Melchior Adam, 209 Weiss, Christian Samuel, 135, 263 Welchman, Alistair, 291 Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb, 276 Wellek, René, 2, 19, 21, 23, 28, 46, 47, 68, 71, 72, 99, 100, 141, 259 ‘Carlyle and German Romanticism’, 71 Confrontations, 19 Immanuel Kant in England, 19 Werner, Abraham Gottleib, 66 Wernerian Natural History Society, 66 Werner, Zacharias, 92 Wette, Martin Leberecht de, 160, 243 Theodor, 160, 194 Whewell, William, 140, 141, 143, 147, 189, 201, 220–222, 225, 237–239, 245 ‘Modern German Philosophy’, 222 History of the Inductive Sciences, 222 On the Principles of English University Education, 238 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 221, 222

324  Index White, Thomas, 54 Wilberforce, Samuel, 196 Wilde, Oscar, 278 Wilkinson, James John Garth, 294 William, Joseph, 226 Williams, L. Pearce, 209, 212, 216 Willis, Kirk, 246 Wilson, George, 191, 192 Wilson, John (Christopher North), 66, 67, 89, 101, 106, 191 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 141 Winkelmann, August Stephan, 40 Wirth, Jason M., 15, 16, 19, 22, 28, 291 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas, 163 Wolf, Friedrich August, 283 Woolf, Virginia, 278, 294 Wordsworth, Christopher, 140, 147

Wordsworth, William, 6, 50, 158, 193, 220, 284 Excursion, 70 ‘Laodamia’, 169 Worsley, Thomas, 140 meets Schelling, 140 Wright, Thomas (minister of Borthwick), 190 True Plan of a Living Temple, 190 Wright, Thomas (Pater’s biographer), 272 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 22, 292