SCHELLING’S RECEPTION

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
BRITISH LITERATURE
GILES WHITELEY
Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century
British Literature
 Giles Whiteley

Schelling’s Reception
in Nineteenth-
Century 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

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Cover illustration: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), German

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 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 con-
tribution 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 dis-
cussed 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 mate-
rial 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
vi    Preface

the University of Manchester Library, and the Houghton Library,

Harvard University, for permission to quote from unpublished manu-
script 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

vii
viii    Contents

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 trans-
lations 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.

ix
 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 litera-
ture, 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 reli-
gions 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 1

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_1
2  G. WHITELEY

We recognise here two currents of Victorian classicism, originally bor-

rowed 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 cen-
tury. While he was widely read by a number of influential thinkers dur-
ing 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 there-
fore 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 unho-
mely 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 nineteenth-
century British intellectual life. While the importance of the role played
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  3

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 impor-
tant, 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 intel-
lectual ‘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 nineteenth-
century 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 litera-
ture 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 repres-
sion. 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 tra-
dition. Naming Schelling, Coleridge remarks that when reading his
4  G. WHITELEY

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 par-
agraphs 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, per-
haps even a kind of wilful denial, a Verneinung [negation] of the ‘obli-
gation’ 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 unac-
knowledged 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 con-
text 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 contem-
porary writer of the Continent’, he begins, and the subordinate clause
qualifies what follows: Coleridge ‘in part’—in some degree or meas-
ure, 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 begin-
ning of the paragraph: ‘Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  5

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 anx-
iety [Angst].3 With respect to Böhme, there are associations with pan-
theism 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 ‘con-
temporary 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 publica-
tion; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coinci-
dence 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 pri-
ority of publication is simply ‘coincidence’. Coleridge ‘might have tran-
scribed’ 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
6  G. WHITELEY

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 consti-
tutes 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 foreshad-
ows 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 discus-

sion 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 con-
tact with philosophy proper’ (GW 14: 84; SE 20: 59), he comments, and
we find in both Coleridge and Freud the same confluence of terms: coin-
cidence, priority, evasion, obligation and debt.
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  7

In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge begins the reckoning of debt

as follows: ‘In Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie, and the System des tran-
scendentalen 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’ simul-
taneously 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 him-
self; 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 con-
trasts 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 sin-
gle sentence. Immediately, at the beginning of the new paragraph, a pro-
viso, an accounting. ‘I have introduced this statement’, Coleridge begins,
‘as appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet rather in refer-
ence 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 ‘coin-
cidence’ more fully, the ‘Logosophia’, Coleridge’s unfinished Magnum
Opus. ‘It would be a mere act of justice to myself’, Coleridge contin-
ues, ‘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.
8  G. WHITELEY

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 prepara-
tory 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
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  9

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 com-
pulsion that reveals and reiterates a return of the repressed. This coinci-
dence 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 syn-
tactic 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 ‘coinci-
dence 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 invest-
ment, and as Paul Hamilton has argued, Coleridge engagement with
10  G. WHITELEY

German philosophy during the period might be termed an ‘erotic’ one

(2007: 2). Here, however, it is possible to read the prefix, sym- (a car-
rying 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 sug-
gests, 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 disingenu-
ousness. 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 ‘obliga-
tions’ 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 pleasur-
able. 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 seem-
ing-chance occurrence can be explained by the prior coinciding of lives,
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  11

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 coincid-
ing of his ideas and Böhme’s are merely coincidence, chance. Both expe-
rience 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 acknowledg-
ing 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 econ-
omy 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 prod-
uct of original thinking’ has ‘better tests than the mere reference to
dates’, Coleridge protests (1984: 1: 164). And his point carries a cer-
tain weight, with some later critics, such as Thomas McFarland, keen to
attempt to absolve him of his crimes posthumously. But given the lexi-
cal 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 fortui-
tous ‘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, avoid-
ance, 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
12  G. WHITELEY

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 symp-
tomatic 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 fig-
ure, 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 per-
versely 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 repack-
age 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
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  13

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 influ-
ential was Schelling in British nineteenth-century thought?’ Such ques-
tions 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 con-
sideration of text and a double context: the original text must be situ-
ated 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 speak-
ing, this career can be broken down into three phases.8 The first was his
early transcendental philosophy (1795–1800), which involved a move-
ment 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 reign-
ing 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 ‘nega-
tive’ 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.
14  G. WHITELEY

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 akad-
emischen 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, mov-
ing 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
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  15

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 fol-
lowers 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 con-
tinued 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 lectur-
ing on both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of mythol-
ogy, to an audience including the future neo-Lutheran theologian
Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875). Back at Munich, Schelling lec-
tured 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
16  G. WHITELEY

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 suc-
ceed him to the chair at the University of Berlin. His lectures there (dis-
cussed 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 fig-
ures 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, wit-
nessing 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],
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  17

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 his-
tory. 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 his-
tory? 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 ear-
lier. 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, pre-
cisely since this lecture remains supplementary, and not a clear introduc-
tion 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 read-
ing of Schelling’s positive philosophy by these individuals was inflected
by a reading of Coleridge, of Coleridge reading Schelling, of the plagia-
rism 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
18  G. WHITELEY

unpublished sources, and involving some amount of educated specula-

tion. Or finally, is the moment much later, after the publication of the
lectures in the Sämmtliche Werke in 1856–1858, dating perhaps to some-
time 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 dis-
course 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 com-
petes 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 edi-
tions, 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 pub-
lished 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 lit-
erature, 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 nineteenth-
century 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 ques-
tion, why Schelling?
To a certain degree, the critical operation here, the very question of
Schelling, the putting Schelling into question, is itself always already
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  19

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 phi-
losophy, 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 per-
spective 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 lev-
elled 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
20  G. WHITELEY

‘largely ignored in the English speaking world’, with the brief excep-
tion 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 reces-
sion 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 particu-
lar constitutes one altogether too neat, bypassing Schelling in a kind of
Aufhebung or ‘sublimation’ into the figure of Hegel himself: it is a narra-
tive 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 nineteenth-
century 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 (aesthet-
ics, theology, philosophy and science), this book contests the widely-
assumed narrative of Schelling as an aberration in British thought,
whether as a footnote to Kant, an immaterial pretender to Hegel, or sim-
ply 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 cer-
tain moments when Schelling seems to be beginning to become margin-
alised, 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 dis-
cursive networks of his reception suggests that we may also need to
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  21

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 twenti-
eth century. The reasons for this are complex. No doubt the domi-
nance 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 vir-
tually 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 redis-
cover 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 phe-
nomenology, 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 ambigu-
ous, although he was forced to admit that Kant had been ‘generally con-
sidered 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 phil-
osophical tradition, and in particular to Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000).17 But of Schelling, Russell
22  G. WHITELEY

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 rep-
resenting the analytical philosophical tradition, gives Schelling’s remark-
able philosophical career two sentences only. Little wonder so few British
literary critics or philosophers, under the influence of this analytical tra-
dition, 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, includ-
ing 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 rediscov-
ered for his anticipations of poststructuralist and Lacanian psychoana-
lytic 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 dif-
ferent historical contexts across the period and within different discur-
sive 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.
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  23

Debts and Obligations
This book has three primary aims. First and foremost, it seeks to estab-
lish the importance of Schelling throughout nineteenth-century British
literature, thereby demonstrating that interest in Schelling was not lim-
ited to his Naturphilosophie or to the Romantics. Secondly, and concur-
rently, it seeks to reconceive the narrative of the reception of German
idealism during the nineteenth century as it has been traditionally under-
stood. 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 nine-
teenth 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 interpreta-
tions 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 indi-
vidual 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 ques-
tions 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 tra-
dition. Dealing with the earlier reception by Crabb Robinson, who
24  G. WHITELEY

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 signif-
icant voice in British philosophy in the first few decades of the nine-
teenth 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 enthusi-
asm 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 tran-
sitioning 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 trans-
lated Schelling’s Akademierede in 1845, Arnold, Eliot, Lewes, as well as
others.
The next three chapters look thematically at Schelling’s signifi-
cance 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,
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  25

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 philosophi-
cal 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 him-
self 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) contempo-
rary 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 aesthet-
ics. Beginning once again with Coleridge, and his coining of the term
‘tautegory’, this chapter considers the importance of Schelling’s philos-
ophy 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, propos-
ing 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 the-
ory. Tracing a path from Müller and Pater on the unconscious, through
William James (1842–1910) and on to Freud on the uncanny, the con-
clusion then evaluates Schelling’s significance to contemporary continen-
tal philosophical discourse.
This book, then, hopes to achieve a kind of hermeneutic archeol-
ogy 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
26  G. WHITELEY

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 har-
bingers, ‘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 criti-
cism, 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 psychoa-
nalysis, 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 edi-
tion 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 philoso-
phy and theology 1785–1789, centred on the interpretation of Baruch
Spinoza (1632–1677). As Frederick Beiser writes, discussing the sig-
nificance of the pantheism controversy on Schelling, it is ‘no exaggera-
tion 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
 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  27

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 con-
sciously 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 trajec-
tory, and I am aware it has come under recent scrutiny from a number
of scholars: see, for instance, Nassar (2014: 157–257), for a problema-
tisation 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 minor-
ity, 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 supple-
mentarity, 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.
28  G. WHITELEY

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 orig-
inality 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 inau-
gurated 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 tradi-
tion, 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.

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 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  29

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 1  UNCANNY ECHOES  31

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 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 jour-
nal, 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 cita-
tion, 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 impor-
tant 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 33

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_2
34  G. WHITELEY

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, particu-
larly 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 dissemina-
tion 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  35

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’, remarka-
ble 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 philosoph-
ical 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 fundamen-
tal’ (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 con-
troversial, 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 discus-
sion of the state of German medicine that same year which noted ‘the
prevailing system of medical Theory, in Germany, at present, is a mod-
ification of excitability, which was first promulgated by our country-
man 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
36  G. WHITELEY

six years later in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in a piece
‘On the Present State of Medical Science in Germany’. Schelling’s phi-
losophy, according to this Scotsman, is ‘the result of premature meta-
physical 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 aston-
ished to hear men of sense and reflection declare, that what is called
empiricism, sensible experience, and experimental philosophy, are neces-
sarily 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 vol-
umes 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 ret-
rospects 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 char-
acterised 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  37

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 ideal-
ism 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 cre-
ations 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 beard-
less 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 visi-
ble, 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 par-
ticulars, however, simply opining that ‘both are distinguished by violent
Philippics against the oppugners of the new doctrine’ (1803b: 669).
38  G. WHITELEY

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 ret-
rospect 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 oppo-
nent’ 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; espe-
cially 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 pro-
digious 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 com-
missioned 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  39

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 para-
doxes’ (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 depart-
ment of metaphysics. (1804: 207)

Schweighäuser’s attack on Schelling’s supposed atheism will be a popu-

lar refrain for some of Schelling’s readers in British theology, as will the
association of his thought with Catholicism. But Schweighäuser con-
cludes by noting what he deems the ‘considerable success’ that philo-
sophical 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 particu-
lar 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 philoso-
phy’ (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
40  G. WHITELEY

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 dur-
ing 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 exper-
imental physics, which gives an idea of the naturphilosophisches mil-
lieu 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;
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  41

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 pub-
licly 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 phi-
losophy during the period. Crabb Robinson notes Schelling’s con-
temptuous 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 sus-
picious of German ‘mysticism’, which ‘it is the fashion in England to
42  G. WHITELEY

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’, refer-
ring 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 atmos-
phere 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  43

of his censure of our english writers […] He answe’d very handsomely

“Because you are more dangerous: The english empiricists are more con-
sistent 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 inter-
esting 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 Under-
Graduate 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 periph-
erally: 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 sub-
ject matter was too specific for a general British audience (Stelzig 2010:
75). The rejection ‘must have been a bitter pill’ (Stelzig 2010: 76), and
44  G. WHITELEY

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 intui-
tion’ (intellektuelle Anschauung). He explicates the point in a letter to his
brother:

I suspect that his [Schelling’s] System is essentially true In certain lead-

ing 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 scepti-
cism, ‘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.
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  45

Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne

While Crabb Robinson was an important early voice in the British recep-
tion 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 lit-
erary 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 some-
thing 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 philoso-
phy 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).
46  G. WHITELEY

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 unsurpris-
ingly 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 trea-
tise 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 aes-
thetics 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 erro-
neously 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 lec-
tures. The latter, delivered on 11 and 19 February 1804, was particu-
larly well received, and generated important discussion. Seemingly as
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  47

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 analy-
sis, 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 char-
acterisation 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 capac-
ity 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’Al-
lemagne (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 imagina-
tion 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 impor-
tance of Schelling lies. For de Staël, most significant are Schelling’s
‘ingenious applications’ of his ideas, not simply to the sciences (1813: 3:
48  G. WHITELEY

147–148), but to art (1813: 3: 116). It was an emphasis in her presenta-

tion 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 panthe-
ism, 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 agree-
able exposition’ (1814: 220). This having been said, Mackintosh’s praise
is qualified by his misogyny, and he remarks that ‘an account of meta-
physical 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  49

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 theoret-

ical 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
50  G. WHITELEY

nineteenth-century commentators as a figure whose own mystical the-

osophy 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 self-
styled German heir. Likewise, while Keats showed some interest in
contemporary German medical texts, he seems to have come inde-
pendently 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 dia-
rist 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 esti-
mate 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 read-
ers? And fourthly, to what extent did reading Coleridge help to develop
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  51

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 allu-
sion 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 some-
thing of a curiosity that, as far as we can tell, Coleridge did not bor-
row 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 ideal-
ism’ (2007: 2). We have already seen such an eroticism at work in the
52  G. WHITELEY

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 evi-
dence presented in the Biographia Literaria at face value, Coleridge
claims that he first read Kant and then came upon Schelling, with-
out 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 perfunc-
tory 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  53

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 conscious-
ness 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 collabora-
tive 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 funda-
mental 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 any-
thing 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
54  G. WHITELEY

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 spec-
ulation and rumour.
Indeed, while Coleridge suggested that his ‘Logosophia’, the unfin-
ished 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 ‘ventrilo-
quised’ 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 eter-
nal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I con-
sider 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
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  55

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’ [pro-
ductive 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 second-
ary imagination is its mimesis in the aesthetic intuition whereby the art-
ist re-creates the world unconsciously. The imagination is, as Coleridge
puts it three chapters beforehand, the ‘Esemplastic’ power. He dis-
ingenuously 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 instruc-
tive, 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 main-
tained, even as he began to become less enamoured with his metaphys-
ics 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 contribu-
tions 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
56  G. WHITELEY

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 phi-
losophy 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 circu-
lated, 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 per-
haps even more influential in spreading Schelling’s theories when ven-
triloquized through his own voice. ‘What may not an ingenious man
make out against another, if he will put his own definitions on the oth-
er’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.
 2  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1794–1819  57

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 ani-
mal 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 capi-
talisation, 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 eventu-
ally 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).
58  G. WHITELEY

14. Berkeley convincingly frames the hostility in this marginalia within the

context of Coleridge’s interest in the contours of the pantheism contro-
versy (2007: 108–142).
15. For an introductory analysis on these borrowings, see Orsini (1969:
222–237).

Works Cited
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———. 1800a. Review of Schelling’s Ideen. The Medical and Physical Journal 3
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———. 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:
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Berkeley, Richard. 2007. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. London: Palgrave
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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

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Volume III, 1807–1814, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon.
———. 1959b. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume IV,
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———. 2000. Lectures 1818–1819, On the History of Philosophy. The Collected
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60  G. WHITELEY

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———. 1843b. The Conditions of Beauty in the Beautiful Object. The
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———. 1935. The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson. London: J.M. Dent.
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———. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3
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———. 2010. Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus.
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———. 1856–1861. SW. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling,
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———. 1966. On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio
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———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath.
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———. 1798. Kant: Observation sur le Sentiment du Beau and du Sublime.
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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 sus-
pended 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 par-
ticular 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 63

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_3
64  G. WHITELEY

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 cen-
tury Enlightenment philosophy of Thomas Reid (1710–1796), react-
ing in large measure to John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume
(1711–1776), the Scottish school based its conclusions on a realist the-
ory of perception, pitting the testimony of common sense against logi-
cal 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 devel-
oped a continental reputation, attracting students including philosopher
Thomas Brown (1778–1820), economist James Mill (1806–1873), pol-
iticians 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 philoso-
phy [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 contra-
dictory understandings of his position, before a solitary paragraph
on ‘the system of Schelling’, which is reduced to ‘an extension of that
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  65

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 consider-
ing 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, inacces-
sible 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 appreci-
ation 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 philos-
ophie (1828) in the Edinburgh Review changed things. The anonymous
reviewer was Sir William Hamilton, then relatively unknown. After stud-
ying 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 unpub-
lished 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
66  G. WHITELEY

of the founding members of a club for disseminating German periodi-

cals, 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 geolo-
gist 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 with-
drew, 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 ques-
tion 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 poli-
tics, although it also carried some strong criticism of Romantic authors,
as evidenced by Hazlitt’s review, emphasising editorial and contributor
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  67

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 pseu-
donym, 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 oth-
ers; 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 edi-
torship 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 con-
tacted 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 rep-
utation.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 him-
self recalled, the essay was ‘not understood [in Britain], and naturally,
for a season, declared incomprehensible’ (1852: 2n, 1n). Jeffrey, oblivi-
ous 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
68  G. WHITELEY

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 utter-
ances 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 philo-
sophical thought of the century’ (1864: 147). Veitch is overstating the
case, as we have seen, but the article certainly made a substantial pub-
lic impression, and was quickly revered abroad. Victor Cousin, its osten-
sible 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 excel-
lent 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 him-
self 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 philo-
sophical literature from around 1820. By the time of his death, his library
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  69

as a whole numbered close to ten thousand volumes,15 and while we can-

not 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 recep-
tion 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, includ-
ing 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-an-
sich 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 appari-

tion, 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 cred-
its 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
70  G. WHITELEY

reception, marking the first published analysis of the concept explic-

itly linked to Schelling by name to appear in the English language. In
the Biographia, for instance, Coleridge had only discussed the intui-
tion 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, lim-
ited 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 popular-
ises 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 prelim-
inary autogenetic deed-act (Tathandlung), ‘the immediate conscious-
ness 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,
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  71

but Hamilton misunderstands Indifferenz both as a condition of sub-

jectivity, 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 evi-
dence 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 writ-
ten’ (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 crit-
ics 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 signifi-
cance 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
72  G. WHITELEY

of the way in which ‘philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel’

responded to Kant’s Copernican Revolution (1978: 25), but then pro-
ceeds 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 discus-
sion 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 read-
ing 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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  73

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 deduc-

ing 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 abso-
lutely identical and commingling and compounding themselves in intellec-
tual 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 regard-
ing Schelling’s concept of the Anschauung, or it may refer to his con-
fusion 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 con-
fusion 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 read-
ings 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 proselytis-
ing 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
74  G. WHITELEY

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 seri-
ously 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 him-
self. In 1830, in the same letter in which he praised Hamilton, speak-
ing 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 emi-
nent 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 him-
self ’ (108), and Strauss, whose sermons were surprisingly ‘very ortho-
dox’ (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 fasci-
nating.35 According to Aitken, Hegel was interested in ‘Scotch met-
aphysics’ (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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  75

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 associa-
tion 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 congre-
gated, 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, bas-
ing 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 pub-
lished 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 ital-
ics perhaps registering a friendly impatience. John was by now attend-
ing Schelling’s lectures on modern philosophy, delivered in Munich over
the winter semester, and in his reply, dated 29 December, he recalls his
impressions:
76  G. WHITELEY

Schelling is a littlish man [who] reads slowly and with remarkable distinct-
ness 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 firm-
est language, and no word or idea comes forward that has not its mean-
ing. […] 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 opportu-
nity to gain ‘some real Knowledge of this high matter’, Carlyle hop-
ing that through his contact with Schelling a new spirit of philosophy
might emerge to ‘“wash away” the insipid palabra which for the pres-
ent 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 com-
passionate 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.)
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  77

John’s description suggests that Schelling’s comments on British

philosophy in his lectures in Munich were somewhat more mod-
erated 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 him-
self ‘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 admira-
tion’ (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’ [noble-
ness 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
78  G. WHITELEY

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 dur-
ing 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 phi-
losophy. He says Carlyle is certainly the author of the articles in the
Edinburgh Review’ (1869: 2: 447). His information must have origi-
nated 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, reply-
ing 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 lec-
tures, 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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  79

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 ‘teneb-
rific 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 splen-
dours of unholy fire; spectres and tempting demons people it, and, hover-
ing 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 distin-
guished from the ‘mystics’ as ‘a man evidently of deep insight into indi-
vidual things’, but one whose insights currently remain beyond Carlyle:
‘we had not yet appreciated his truth, and therefore could not appreci-
ate 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 narra-
tive 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,
80  G. WHITELEY

speculative personage, who mounts quite out of sight in his talk occa-
sionally’. 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 cer-
tainly 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 inter-
est in engaging John on Schelling in the mid-1830s must be contextual-
ised 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 [Know-
not-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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  81

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 crit-
ics. 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 ear-
lier, in ‘The Everlasting No’, Teufelsdröckh had been in ‘a state of cri-
sis, 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 contin-
ues, ‘which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discern-
ible’ (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 origi-
nally 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 our-
selves caught in the ‘Centre of Indifference’ (the name of the next chap-
ter), rather than witnessing the revelatory and transformative powers
of Fichtean activity incarnated? Why is Teufelsdröckh not yet identical
82  G. WHITELEY

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 litera-
ture. 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 bor-
rowed from Hamilton. In Carlyle’s novel, Indifferenz operates as a mid-
point 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 eluci-
date 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 intro-
duced 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,
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  83

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 hostil-
ity 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’, repre-
sent 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 pre-
served 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 logi-
cal 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 pro-
nounced, 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
84  G. WHITELEY

(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, doubt-

less 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 frag-

ment 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 transcenden-
tal 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 affir-
mation 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 panthe-
ism. 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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  85

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 uncon-
scious’ (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 with-
out 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
86  G. WHITELEY

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, requir-
ing 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 trans-
lation of Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa [Christianity or Europe]
(1799),52 comparison with Carlyle’s source reveals something surpris-
ing. 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 misrecol-
lection 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 pres-
ent 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 reflex-
ivity 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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  87

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 con-
stitutes 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 signifi-
cant ‘firsts’: the first published acknowledgment of the significance of
Schelling’s concept of the Anschauung, and the first published refer-
ence 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; antic-
ipated, but never coming to fruition. The following chapter, enti-
tled ‘Pause’, appears set to begin following Teufelsdröckh through his
‘spiritual majority’ (1987: 149), but is cut short by the Editor who even-
tually ‘give[s] utterance to a painful suspicion which […] has begun to
haunt him’, namely that ‘these Autobiographical Documents are partly a
88  G. WHITELEY

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 popu-
larized and dramatized to his Victorian audience. Yet, at the same time,
Schelling is liminal at the precise moment when he becomes most proxi-
mate. If Sartor Resartus shows Carlyle’s deep engagement with Schelling
on the Anschauung, Indifferenz, and the relationship between con-
sciousness 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 sys-
tèmes 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, cover-
ing 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
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  89

five students, whereas Hegel simultaneously lectured to packed auditori-

ums 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 thou-
sand 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 mar-
ginal comment in his influential essay on the ‘Philosophy of Perception’
(1852: 92), and his Dissertation (1863: 748, 769, 850, 944; in the lat-
ter instance referring to Reinhold on Schelling). Many of these references
deal with Schelling’s supposed violation of the logical law of the excluded
90  G. WHITELEY

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 engage-
ment with Kant, see Beiser (2002: 294–301). Coleridge certainly consid-
ered 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 under-
standing 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 margi-
nalia 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 exist-
ence” 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).
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  91

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 study-
ing 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 pub-
lish the influential Darwin and Hegel (1893), the year before this por-
trait 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
92  G. WHITELEY

must have come to appreciate the text sometime after Jena, for its signif-
icance 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 scep-
tical-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).
 3  SCHELLING’S RECEPTION IN SCOTLAND, 1817–1833  93

48. ‘Unruhe’ is a term with significance in Hegel, as in his discussion of con-

sciousness 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 affir-
mation [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).

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 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 recep-
tion. The ground laid by Hamilton had started to precipitate a change
in the philosophical climate north of the border, establishing the begin-
nings of a new Scottish school, one which sought to wed the com-
mon 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 pla-
giarism 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 stud-
ies, posing questions not simply about exactly how much he had pla-
giarised 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

© The Author(s) 2018 99

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_4
100  G. WHITELEY

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 phil-
osophical 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 “plagia-
rism” cannot stand the stress of historical examination. […] It has no
proper applicability to the activities, however unconventional, of a pow-
erful, 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 pro-
pose 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.
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  101

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 pla-
giarism’ (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 acquaint-
ance 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 accommodat-
ing 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,
102  G. WHITELEY

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 sub-
ject 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 plagia-
rism 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 par-
allel 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 out-
ing 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 post-
humous 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 dis-
missive 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 thou-
sands of essays have been written on it, of which many hundreds have
been read by many tens of persons’ (2003d: 291), a law of diminish-
ing 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
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  103

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 tran-
scendental 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 plagia-
rised 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 heart-
ily’ 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 pri-
oritising 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
104  G. WHITELEY

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 not-
ing from the outset his significance as a respondent on a topic related
to Coleridge or Schelling. Hare had been friends with Coleridge, hold-
ing 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 sig-
nificance. 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 end-
less 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 ‘influ-
ence 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 ‘friend-
ship’ (1835: 16), and the credibility of his allegations needed to be
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  105

weighed against the pecuniary motives of the opportunist who had writ-
ten them. Hare finds the timing, coming ‘before the sound of his knell
had died away’ (1835: 19), inexcusable. For Hare, de Quincey’s ‘slov-
enly 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 mem-
ory 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 signif-
icance in his 1839 article introducing German ‘Transcendentalism’ to
American audiences (1840: 25–27).
106  G. WHITELEY

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 gos-
siping about it well before his article in Tait’s in 1834, as we can sur-
mise from one of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ dating from some eleven
years beforehand. This series of seventy-one imaginary colloquies, pub-
lished in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1822 to 1835, was written primar-
ily 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 lit-
erature, 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 orig-
inal; […] 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 dis-
belief that Coleridge would steal from fellow writers ‘poorer than him-
self’. 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, visit-
ing Heidelberg, Leipsig and Berlin (Haldane 1899: 27–33). Upon his
return, Ferrier became Hamilton’s most prodigiously brilliant follower,
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  107

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 eventu-
ally 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 “bar-
ren 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 eval-
uate 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)
108  G. WHITELEY

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 ‘sim-
ilarity: 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 mislead-
ing’ (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 plagia-
rise 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 neolo-
gism ‘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 sup-
port 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 esem-
plastic’, 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 cul-
mination 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
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  109

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 imagina-
tion [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 alto-
gether, 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 aug-
mented 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 lit-
erary reaver’, with Hamilton twisting the knife by concluding that it was
110  G. WHITELEY

Coleridge’s ‘ignorance of French alone which freed France from contri-

bution’ (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 fam-
ily, 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 unfold-
ing 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 “stu-
pendous 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
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  111

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-nineteenth-
century 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 fas-
cinate 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 gen-
eral impression in both England and Germany [was] against’ Coleridge
(1848: 151).
De Quincey, whose contribution to the debate had been character-
ised 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 under-
stood. 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)
112  G. WHITELEY

Addressing in a footnote ‘the ostrich-like devices’ by which Coleridge

had ‘sought to efface his own footsteps’, Stirling vividly attacks all par-
ties, 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 some-
thing […] 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 main-
tains 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 under-
standing 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 under-
standing 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
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  113

scholar Clement Mansfield Ingleby (1823–1886), returned to the same

ground. ‘Coleridge was a poet’, Ingleby maintained, but not a philos-
opher, for while ‘much in Coleridge’s works is suggestive, stimulating,
striking’, ‘poetry that goes no further than that is but inchoate philos-
ophy’ (1870: 404). For Ingleby, ‘Coleridge never thoroughly under-
stood Schelling’ (1870: 406),7 and in his damning estimate, the ‘poetical
vagueness of vast possibilities’ which seemed to be promised by his read-
ing 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 amaze-
ment 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 fit-
tingly 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 impor-
tant 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).
114  G. WHITELEY

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
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Rodolpi.
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———. 1976. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 4:
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———. 1984. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 12:
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———. 1986. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 14:
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 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  115

Clej, Alina. 1995. A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the
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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1835. Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel
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———. 1847. Biographia Literaria, ed. Sara Coleridge, 2 vols. London: W.
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———. 1984. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate.
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Davie, George. 2003. Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment.
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———. 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
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———. 2003b. Conversation and S.T. Coleridge. In Transcripts of Unlocated
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———. 2003c. Note [on Coleridge’s Plagiarisms]. In Autobiographic Sketches,
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Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Routledge.
———. 2003d. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Articles from Tait’s Edinburgh
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Consciousness. Blackwood’s Magazine 43: 187–201.
———. 1840. The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge. Blackwood’s Magazine 47:
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———. 1854. Institutes of Metaphysics: The Theory of Knowing and Being.
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Fruman, Norman. 1971. Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel. London: George
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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.
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Ingleby, C.M. 1870. On Some Points Connected with the Philosophy of
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Kooy, John Michael. 2002. Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education. London:
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J. M. Dent.
Lowes, John Livingston. 1927. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the
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Merivale, John Herman. [Anon.]. 1835. Review of Specimens of the Table Talk of
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the Transcendental Philosophy of the Germans and Cousin. Cambridge, MA:
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Robertson, John Mackinnon. 1897. New Essays Towards a Critical Method.
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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.
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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.
 4  THE PLAGIARISM CONTROVERSY  117

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 tak-
ing 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 domi-
nate 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 dread-
ful dragon of Hegelianism, which breathed the fire of godlessness and
the smoke of obscuration!’ (1975a: 192) This chapter briefly contextu-
alises 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.

© The Author(s) 2018 119

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_5
120  G. WHITELEY

The Organ of the Nation

Frederick William IV had been crowned King of Prussia in 1840, tak-
ing 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 dur-
ing 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, gradu-
ally came under the sway of Hegelianism through the leadership of Karl
von Stein (1757–1831) and Johannes Schultze (1786–1869), the lat-
ter 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 liter-
ary 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 rationaliz-
ing the natural sciences’ (1868: 1: 41). On the basis of Bunsen’s inter-
est, 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 instruct-
ing 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 histori-
cal 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
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  121

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 some-
thing of an event, attended by important or soon-to-be-important fig-
ures 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 ‘thunder-
cloud [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 com-
mented on their make-up:

Schelling lectures to a select, numerous, and yet also an undique confla-

tum 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 unre-
lated, 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
122  G. WHITELEY

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 ‘ref-
ormation’ 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 associ-
ate 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 com-

ments 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
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  123

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 dis-
tinguished 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 par-
enthetical 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 him-
self 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
124  G. WHITELEY

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 poli-
tics 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 char-
acter, 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 devel-
opment 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 sum-
mary 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
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  125

censorship noted by Medwin was also a point which Marx would allude
to: ‘The entire German police is at his [Schelling’s] disposal […]. A cen-
sorship 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 correspond-
ent who contributed the column of ‘Foreign Literary Intelligence’ for
The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1841, simply notes the ‘wise res-
olution’ 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 con-
servative daily. Far from associating the appointment with a movement
towards a reactionary politics, as Medwin would, the anonymous corre-
spondent writing from Cologne in The Times (dated 23 February, pub-
lished 1 March 1841), read William IV’s actions from the diametrically
opposite position. Comparing Prussia unfavourably with recent develop-
ments 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 phi-
losophy 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 pre-
cisely 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 pro-
gressivism 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 car-
ried in The Times. The author alludes in general terms to Schelling’s lec-
tures 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
126  G. WHITELEY

elements, science and Christianity. The sensation is immense, the lec-

ture-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 gen-
eral’ (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 dif-
ferent 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 corre-
spondent links Schelling’s appointment with the wider situation under
William IV: he notes that liberals ‘have been put under the surveillance
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  127

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 lat-
est 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 hith-
erto 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’.
128  G. WHITELEY

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 rational-

ism 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 uncer-
tain 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) pro-
pounded 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 appoint-
ment 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 poli-
tics: non-partisan but leaning liberal-radical. Commenting on the vio-
lent 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 anon-
ymous 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,
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  129

SCHELLING, who probably cannot bear that men should involve them-
selves in any other clouds of narcotic smoke than those which his meta-
physics 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 set-
ting 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 edu-
cated 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 pre-
vious 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 his-
tory 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.
130  G. WHITELEY

The significance played by Stanley and Jowett in mid-Victorian intellec-

tual 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 classi-
cal 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 last-
ing 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 pre-
dominated (den Otter 1996: 38–45), and introduced whole genera-
tions 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 deep-
est 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 reme-
died 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
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  131

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 lec-
tures, Jowett recalled, that it was ‘impossible’ for a foreigner to form an
132  G. WHITELEY

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 friend-
liness’ (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 ear-
lier. 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] col-
lected 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 seem-
ingly 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
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  133

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 enthusiasti-
cally 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 acknowl-
edged 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 ‘ren-
dering myself responsible’ for Schelling’s ‘general views’ (1847: vii–viii).
Jowett, for his part, also distanced himself from Schelling in his pub-
lished 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 atmos-
phere 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 through-
out 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
134  G. WHITELEY

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, con-
cluding 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 theol-
ogy, 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 distur-
bances amongst the students in Berlin, wrote: ‘Pietism […] designate[s]
that exaggerated religious feeling which is supposed to be the surest rec-
ommendation 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
 5  SCHELLING IN BERLIN  135

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 com-
plete the realities of life have crushed out of men’s minds the ghostly
phantoms’ of Schelling’s philosophy. For this author, ‘the singular incom-
petence 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 appoint-
ment, before giving another palpable description of the events; the lec-
ture 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 combus-
tible 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 dia-
lectic 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
136  G. WHITELEY

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 master-
stroke’, 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
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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.
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———. 1842d. Smoke. The Spectator, [n.s.] 15 (730) (25 June): 615.
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(January): 398–404.
———. 1844. Prussia. Foreign Quarterly Review 33 (April): 137–138.
———. 1850. Literature. The Leader. August 24: 521–522.
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Clough, Arthur Hugh. 1865. Letters and Remains. London: Spottiswoode &
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den Otter, Sandra. 1996. British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in
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———. 1975b. Schelling on Hegel. In Marx Engels Collected Works, 50 vols.,
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 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 min-
imize 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 plagia-
rism 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 fic-
tion (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 139

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_6
140  G. WHITELEY

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 invi-
tation 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 appar-
ent affection for Scheibert’s daughter, an incident displaying the phi-
losopher 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
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  141

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 inter-
ested 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 meas-

ure 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 them-
selves’ (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 uncer-
tain, 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
142  G. WHITELEY

that the works which want the stamp of this unconscious skill, are shal-
low and possess, as it were, no independent existence’ (1833: 94).
When Guesses at Truth was published in a second, expanded addi-
tion 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, con-
sidering the extent to which Schelling’s work tapped into the uncon-
scious 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 quota-
tion 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 prop-
erties 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 distin-
guished 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, discern-
ing 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 conscious-
ness. The waters which are spread out above that surface, and which are
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  143

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 lit-

tle 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 occa-
sion Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ (1849), was less effusive in his esti-
mation 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 dur-
ing the long vacation, staying in Munich. He attended Schelling’s lec-
tures 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
144  G. WHITELEY

‘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 discuss-
ing 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, tune-
ful voice of Nature’ which he taught to be ‘animated by a higher prin-
ciple 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 pro-
duced in Europe since the time of Rousseau’, and Schelling ranked with
Tieck as its foremost living representative, manifesting ‘in the flesh a lit-
erature, 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 grad-
uated. Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885) would study at Bonn
after graduating in 1831, before becoming an MP in 1837 and publish-
ing 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 clos-
est friends, Hallam and Lushington, read Schelling, although with dif-
fering results. Hallam seems not to have been particularly enamoured
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  145

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 foot-
note, 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 pan-
theistic principles to the theory and historic criticism of the Gospel (1840)
by William Hodge Mill (1792–1853). Lambasting Mill’s poor com-
mand 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 remem-
bered for his posthumously published Icelandic–English Dictionary
(1874), Cleasby had studied with Hamilton in Edinburgh, 1827–1829,
146  G. WHITELEY

and ‘fortified with his Scotch metaphysics’ began on German philos-

ophy (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 sea-
son 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 assem-
bly, 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, hav-
ing 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,
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  147

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 stud-
ying under Schelling. Henry Reeve (1813–1895) was a poet and jour-
nalist, 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 sys-
tem 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
148  G. WHITELEY

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 disci-
ple 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 illustri-
ous 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 alle-
gorical 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’:
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  149

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 propri-
ety 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) lec-
tures 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 anony-
mous author wrote a series of extended articles for The Eclectic Review
150  G. WHITELEY

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 theo-
rist 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 pub-
lished were on economics, but he published some articles on contempo-
rary 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,
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  151

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 gen-
eration, 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 constitu-
tionally unable to develop a coherent philosophy of aesthetics of their
own (Morley 1929: 118; Robinson 1869: 1: 128–129). Johnson, seem-
ingly 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 philoso-
phy, simply noting that the Akademierede ‘is, in fact, an application to
art of Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. Maintaining, as he does, a cre-
ative 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 help-
ing 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
152  G. WHITELEY

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 noth-
ing better than an ingenious fiction’, and his style faulted by a ‘vague and
indeterminate mode of expression’ (1832: 449). The ‘peculiar difficul-
ties’ 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 inconsist-
encies 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 period-
icals, with one particularly appreciative notice of this ‘admirable ora-
tion’ 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 appro-
priate’ (1847: 337), such an affirmation is perhaps more an attempt
at currying favour given that Patmore was not yet an established jour-
nalist. 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 impli-
cations of a Naturphilosophie such as Schelling’s, unable to see that ‘all
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  153

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 consider-
ation of the ‘Ethics of Art’ (1839) that he would develop in a review two
years later. Indeed, Patmore evidently intended to return more explic-
itly to the subject of Schelling, quoting from the Akademierede at
some length at the conclusion to his review before ending in parenthe-
sis: ‘(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 famil-
iar name of George Eliot. The two met in 1851 while Eliot was assis-
tant 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 trans-
lation of the Philosophy of Art advertised on its fly-leaf. During the late
1840s and early 1850s, Eliot was reading Spinoza, working on transla-
tions of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethica (although nei-
ther 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, din-
ing at his home in Shacklewell (Haight 1954b: 27). Lewes also knew
Johnson, although he seemed less keen on him, and after beginning his
154  G. WHITELEY

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 ‘inexhaust-
ible incomparable monologues’ (1837: 105), suggests that Lewes main-
tained some previous interest in idealist philosophy, seemingly alluding
to Naturphilosophie:

Look through nature, and you find one imperishable and progressive sys-
tem of universal organism - one universal life! Strip off the outer integu-
ments - 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 immeas-
urably 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
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  155

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 prom-
inently 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 acknowledg-
ment his rendition of Schelling (Lushington 1841: 524). When Schelling
returns to the text a few pages on, now credited as Spinoza’s most impor-
tant 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, per-
haps 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
156  G. WHITELEY

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 phi-
losopher 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 bear-
ing, 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 end-
ing 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 pos-
sible 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 pur-
pose 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
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  157

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 philoso-
phy, 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 over-
view 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 analy-
sis 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 treat-
ment 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 lec-
turing on the subject in February 1849 at Liverpool Mechanics Institute
and in March and April at the Manchester Athenæum, with local news-
paper 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 some-
thing 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
158  G. WHITELEY

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 per-
functory 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 phi-
losophy, 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 ‘Germano-
Coleridgean’ 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, writ-
ing 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
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  159

history shows just the reverse of what you seem to express; and that a ten-
dency 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 voy-
age 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 signif-
icantly 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),
160  G. WHITELEY

there are plenty of neo-platonic echoes in the text, and Lewes had ten-
tatively 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 lec-
tures, 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
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  161

[Christ] renewed it for all men’ (Biswas 1972: 476). It seems in this con-
text 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 philos-
ophy. 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 burn-
ing 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 transmit-
ted 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 arti-
cle ‘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
162  G. WHITELEY

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 surround-
ings 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 vol-
ume 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 defi-
nition 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 nine-
teenth-century literary responses to Schelling’s philosophy came through
Walter Pater, a leading figure of British aestheticism, but other writ-
ers 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 foot-
note 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
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  163

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 pre-
cipitated a new bout of popular anti-Catholic sentiment five years after
Newman’s conversion. Through his portrait of Blougram, Browning fig-
ures 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 dis-
cussion 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 Day-
Dream’ with Schelling’s philosophy, in a passage which shows the influ-
ence both of Carlyle and of Mansel:
164  G. WHITELEY

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 orig-
inal ‘simplicity’ of Coleridge’s poetry (1884: 122). Roden Noel, for
his part, is an interesting character in Victorian literature, and he later
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  165

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 novel-
ist 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 “Identitäts-
philosophie” (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 jus-
tify Noel’s treatment of his Egyptian theme, with Noel defending him-
self 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 dis-
cusses 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)
166  G. WHITELEY

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 metaphys-
ics’ 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,
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  167

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 pes-
simism 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 Bois-
Reymond (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 pub-
lished 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 man-
kind is presented as a tragi-comedy, which is not worth the representa-
tion, in which the most important parts are assigned to the feeblest actors.
(Hardy 1985: 170; quoting Sully 1877: 28)
168  G. WHITELEY

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 par-
ticular 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 uncon-
scious 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 note-
book 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 pro-
cess by which the Spirit tends to rise to a consciousness of itself’ (Hardy
1985: 95, 109). He also returned to Hartmann, quoting the same pas-
sage 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.
 6  THE VICTORIAN LITERARY RECEPTION OF SCHELLING  169

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 phi-
losophy’, 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 affirma-
tive 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 con-
sciousness 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’indif-
férence 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 dis-
cussion 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
170  G. WHITELEY

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 forgot-
ten us and our curls. I should not possibly think of sacrificing my ring-
lets 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).

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 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 stand-
ard 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 cir-
cles. But as this chapter will demonstrate, the number of figures engag-
ing 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 diffi-
culty given the context for the transmission of these different perspec-
tives: 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 177

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_7
178  G. WHITELEY

Gottheiten von Samothrake. Coleridge’s break with Schelling over theo-

logical 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 reve-
lation would have been limited to those who had heard him personally in
Munich or in Berlin. Consequently, nineteenth-century British theolog-
ical 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 philoso-
phy based on first-hand knowledge of hearing Schelling lecture (Hare,
Maurice, Cairns), or a more polemic response to his supposed panthe-
ism (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 theologi-
cal debates that threatened to overwhelm the Anglican tradition, particu-
larly 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 preced-
ing page’ (1984: 1: 161): the unfinished Magnum Opus, in which
Coleridge had dreamed of finally resolving Christian thought and justi-
fying 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  179

nineteenth century may have had just cause in assuming that his the-
ology 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 con-
tentious and ill-understood during the period.
In point of fact, Coleridge’s own religious position underwent vari-
ous 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 endeav-
ours.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 fun-
damental errors of Schelling. – 1. the establishment of Polarity in
the Absolute – and 2. the confusion of Ideas, with Theorums on one
side, and < with > 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
180  G. WHITELEY

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 ulti-
mately 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 knowl-
edge, 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 dur-
ing 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 prob-
lem 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 self-
manifestation 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  181

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 intel-
ligibly 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 frag-
ment ‘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 eter-
nal 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 comple-
tion a co-eternal which is both […]. Hence, the
COMMUNITY: The eternal LIFE, which is LOVE ‑ the Spirit; rela-
tively 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 real-
ity of the True, in the form of actual Life = Wisdom.
(1995: 1510–1512)
182  G. WHITELEY

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 dur-
ing 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 crit-
icise 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  183

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 his-
torical 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 rev-
elation 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 boot-
legged 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 disgrac-
ing 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 consid-
erations 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 implica-
tions of Petrine and Pauline theology.

German ‘Heresies’: Schelling and Anglo-Catholicism

The Germano-Coleridgeans such as Hare and Maurice broadly iden-
tified 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
184  G. WHITELEY

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 tran-
scendental 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 sta-
tus, 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 the-
ological: Maurice sought to claim Schelling’s philosophy for a form of,
admittedly ‘transcendental’, Protestantism, while simultaneously distanc-
ing 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 sup-
posed ‘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 Anglo-
Catholics, 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  185

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 philoso-
phy 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 lan-
guage suggests that Pusey by this date held a somewhat standard, neg-
ative 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
186  G. WHITELEY

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 par-
ticularly 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 phi-
losophy, 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 theolo-
gian 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 rev-

olution; while the activity and independence of mind, which it much con-
tributed to rouse, precluded those parts within itself, from which danger
might be apprehended to the Christian system, from exerting that univer-
sal 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)
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  187

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 knowl-
edge’ than Kant had done (1828: 169). Far from constituting a panthe-
ism, 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 intro-
duction 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 ral-
lying cry for Anglicans to come together: ‘But at this day, when the con-
nexion 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 essen-
tial kindred of spirit between his thought and contemporary develop-
ments 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 spekula-
tiven Philosophie [Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy] (1837)
in 1860, Newman concludes that ‘I do not think that I am bound to
188  G. WHITELEY

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 grad-
uated 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 the-
ology. Palmer’s records show that Russia was alive with German tran-
scendentalism 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 posi-
tively 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), writ-
ten when he began courting the Church north of the border after his
own High Church leanings began to be seen as too radical for main-
stream 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 exam-
ple 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 develop-
ment between the Petrine principle of obedience, the Pauline principle
of protestation, and the Johannine principle of love. The news derived
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  189

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 pub-
lish, 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 him-
self met him the year beforehand.8 Rio did not, in point of fact, pub-
lish 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 invinci-
ble 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 rapproche-
ment 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 latitu-
dinarian impulse of the Broad Church movement, who had sought
to open Anglicanism up to the Dissenters. But it was not simply the
190  G. WHITELEY

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 justifi-
cation 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 person-
ally. 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 toler-
ate 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 popu-
lar 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 mon-
ism proved difficult to ratify with his own branch of Calvinism, Wright
acknowledges the diffuse influence of ‘many luminous views, leading
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  191

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 situa-
tion 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 phi-
losophy 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 him-
self, 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 thor-
oughly 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 philos-
ophy, […] 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
192  G. WHITELEY

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 misera-

ble 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 influ-
ence 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 aesthe-
tik’ 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 ‘unintel-
ligibility’, ‘the result is gratifying in itself’. Such, at least, was the criti-
cism 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  193

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 crit-
icism at the Lancashire Independent College in Manchester in 1842.
He published his Sacred Hermeneutics the year after, in which he dis-
cussed 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, ‘philo-
sophical 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 influ-
enced by Romanticism, travelling to the Lake District in 1826 to meet
Wordsworth (1872: 1: 72–74). Suffering from a bout of nervous exhaus-
tion, 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
194  G. WHITELEY

the authors of Unitarianism Defended (1839), and reflecting on a dis-

cussion held between Tayler, John Gooch Robberds (1789–1854) and
James Martineau, about the future direction of their quarterly meet-
ings, 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 inwo-
ven’, 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 (even-
tually published in 1842), as part of the Boston publisher and transcen-
dentalist 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 let-
ter 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 dream-
land of German transcendentalism, shows that it is not without definite
and habitable provinces of thought, and gives names to the strange shad-
ows 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 orig-
inal language to level such a criticism. Although Martineau remained
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  195

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 contin-
ued importance of this ‘border territory between psychology and the-
ology’ (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 emp-
tied 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 devel-
oped 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 car-
ried 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 pub-
lish 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 con-
versation 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
196  G. WHITELEY

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 read-
ing 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 concep-
tions 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 mid-
Victorian 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 philos-
ophers 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 panthe-
istic 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  197

of Schelling’s own works is a point which the Anglo-Coleridgeans made

forcibly in coming to Schelling’s defence. Alongside Lushington’s scath-
ing 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 pro-
fesses to teach the English public what great reason they have for abhor-
ring […] 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.
198  G. WHITELEY

The popular discourse of theology was something else, however.

One of the most important late nineteenth-century Anglican theo-
logians, Henry Parry Liddon (1829–1890), was broadly hostile to
Schelling, discussing his theology regularly in sermons given through-
out 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 incarna-
tion, 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 dis-
cussed 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
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  199

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 seri-
ously with Schelling, only Charles Upton (1831–1920) did so in a man-
ner 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 ref-
erence 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 success-
ful 1885 Hibbert lectures, led to the commissioning of a book on a sim-
ilar 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 philo-
sophical thinkers’, Pfleiderer deems them undermined by the author’s ten-
dency towards ‘mythological poetry’. Even when being introduced by a
fellow countryman in the final decade of the century, Schelling was una-
ble to escape the association with the worst of Romanticism. Pfleiderer
200  G. WHITELEY

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 cen-
tral developments of British theological discourse, which continued
to attack an image of Schelling epitomised by a pantheistic interpreta-
tion 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 com-
ing 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 ear-
nestly 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).
 7  SCHELLING AND BRITISH THEOLOGY  201

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 com-
plained 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 con-
fronting 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 lec-
tures 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).
202  G. WHITELEY

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 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 ‘the-
ory 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 mod-
ern 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 207

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_8
208  G. WHITELEY

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 eight-
eenth 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, includ-
ing 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 his-
tory 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 meth-
odological issues in attempting to reconstruct such a history, includ-
ing 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 knowl-
edge’ when attempting to evaluate his influence on nineteenth century
scientists. Rather ‘what one needs in order to get a handle on the ques-
tion of influence is a grasp of the relatively small set of concepts that
characterize work in a naturphilosophisch mode’ (1997: 40). These cen-
tral 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  209

the discourse of early nineteenth-century science that Naturphilosophie

may be argued to have ‘provided an appropriate philosophical back-
ground’ 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 phys-
ics 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 reduc-
tion 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 num-
bered Ritter, Davy, Oersted, and Michael Faraday’ (1965: 62). But while
it is true that Schelling exploited some of the implications he saw under-
writing 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 philoso-
phy in a Natur-Metaphysik (1797), one which relied on Brown’s con-
cept 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 evi-
denced in a number of Coleridge’s entries in his notebooks dating from
the period (1957: ##388–389).1 Schelling himself perhaps first encoun-
tered Brown’s ideas through reading Andreas Röschlaub’s (1768–1835)
Untersuchungen über Pathologie (1798), and in the summer of 1800
210  G. WHITELEY

he travelled to Bamberg to study in Röschlaub’s clinic. It has even

been suggested that Schelling’s attempts to apply Brown’s theo-
ries 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 ger-
man [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)
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  211

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 materi-
alism’ 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 pub-
lication of Davy’s Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800), dis-
cussing 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
212  G. WHITELEY

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 real-
ized 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 dis-
pute, 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 under-
stood 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 pecu-
liar 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 philosoph-
ical 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  213

electrochemistry, and it was through combining the discoveries of Davy

and Ritter that Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the principle of electro-
magnetism 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 phi-
losophy] that did not devalue physical being in favor of an unchang-
ing 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 ‘well-
known 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 sugges-
tion 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 par-
ticular 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 polar-
ity. Writing to Charles Augustus Tulk (1786–1849), the Swedenborgian,
in September 1817 Coleridge states that ‘in my literary Life, you will
214  G. WHITELEY

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 detach-
ment 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 mani-
fest 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 indi-
viduation 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 exclu-
sively, 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 propor-
tions 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 com-
munity were also becoming aware of the value of Naturphilosophie. We
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  215

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 philoso-
phy of nature (Naturphilosophie)’. While the anonymous author can-
not help but dig at ‘the excrescences of this new doctrine; the mystical
obscurity […]; the extravagant, and therefore absurd, desire of institut-
ing 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 recog-
nise that ‘the element of mind to which the German owes his vast repu-
tation as the most philosophical of all men; […] which produced Kant,
and Goethe […] and Oken, Carus and [Johann Baptist von] Spix [1781-
1826], […] 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 dif-
fered 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 Natur-

philosophen, 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 acquaint-
ance […], [with] a permanent value. But as a System, […] it is reduced at
216  G. WHITELEY

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 pre-
vented 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, how-
ever 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 fig-
ure, Richard Owen, today remembered for coining the word ‘dinosaur’,
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  217

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 fif-
teen 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 selig-
machende 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 lecture-
ship 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 stud-
ies with Schelling in 1816 in his autobiography (1837: 1).
Owen encountered Green firstly in his capacity as Hunterian lec-
turer. 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
218  G. WHITELEY

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 signif-
icant 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 distin-
guishing 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 read-
ing 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 trans-
lation (xxix–xxx) and in the text itself he characterises ‘nature as labour-
ing 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 specula-
tions 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  219

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 sub-
ject; 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).
220  G. WHITELEY

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 him-
self 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 dif-
fusely, Owen’s concept of the ‘archetype’. A few years later, the German
poet became friends with the Wunderkind Schelling after the publica-
tion 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 ‘scien-
tist’ 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  221

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 num-
ber 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 promi-
nent 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 prov-
ost 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 ven-
tured 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)
222  G. WHITELEY

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 simi-
lar 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 pro-
viding 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 vol-
ume 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 discus-
sion 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, his-
tory 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.
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  223

Schelling and Agnosticism
With Charles Darwin’s victory over Owen, the face of nineteenth-
century 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 influ-
ential on the creation of the new Scottish school of philosophy and dis-
cussed 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 sci-
ence: 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 philosophi-
cal 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 follow-
ing years, spill over into the discourse of contemporary science. It pro-
duced results which neither Mansel, Hamilton, nor Schelling before
224  G. WHITELEY

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 contempo-
rary 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 ‘illus-
trious’ Hamilton and to Kant (1851: xi), dismissing Schelling’s ‘extrava-
gancies’ (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 sylla-
bus to include more focus on the natural sciences, contemporaries who
were sympathetic to German thought, and specific philosophers includ-
ing 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,
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  225

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 intro-
duce 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 succes-
sors should attempt to interpret the dream, and behind the shadow to
grasp the substance’ (1873: 179). Schelling’s attempt ‘based his phi-
losophy 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 tran-
scend 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 sim-
ply by Hamilton, for he quotes Schelling and the other German think-
ers 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 discus-
sion 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
226  G. WHITELEY

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 lec-
tures. 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 great-
est debts. In The Limits of Religious Thought, Mansel argues to
the Hamiltonian letter that all human knowledge is one of rela-
tion, meaning that it is conditioned. But knowledge of God is of
another kind, since there can be no relation with that which tran-
scends 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 concern-
ing whose consciousness we can only make the negative assertion
that it is not like our consciousness’ (1858: 16). While Mansel ulti-
mately 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 edi-
tion 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, scutinis-
ing the text of the bible from the perspective of history and a philos-
ophy 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  227

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 diffi-
culty’ (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 phi-
losophy, 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 disci-
ples 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 rela-
tionship with Hare, his attack ultimately rested on his belief in the pos-
sibility of a personal relation with God, one which Mansel appeared to
argue was impossible.
228  G. WHITELEY

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 trans-
lated 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 com-
posed of arbitrary theories, unsupported by any just evidence, and lead-
ing to no useful conclusion’ (Villers 1805: 336). His son’s interest in
Schelling can be definitively dated at least to 1833 and his correspond-
ence 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 dis-
cussing 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 detest-
able, 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  229

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 possi-
bility 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 impo-
tence of reason in matters theological, would remain agnostic concern-
ing 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 atmos-
phere 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 demon-
stration, 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
230  G. WHITELEY

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 athe-
ist in the sense of denying the existence of a God’, but ‘I think that gen-
erally […] 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 lit-
erature 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 propen-
sity 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 previ-
ous 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
 8  THE LEGACIES OF NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND BRITISH SCIENCE  231

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).
232  G. WHITELEY

14. Sterling notes that from what he had heard of the recent lectures on
the philosophy of revelation, Schelling’s views ‘present a very remark-
able 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 reli-
gion. 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).

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 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 narra-
tive, 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 237

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_9
238  G. WHITELEY

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 broad-
est 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 read-
ers quoted from the text, which was particularly influential on the broth-
ers 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 uni-
versity 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
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  239

of the Humboldtian model. The German return to the ‘speculative’ had

not produced the results that had been expected, for while ‘their profes-
sors 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 uni-
versities, Hegel and Schelling, cannot understand that Newton went fur-
ther than Kepler had gone in physical astronomy. (1837: 25)

The German professors, Whewell opines, are less interested in the fur-
thering 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 sys-
tem may protect us […] from a race of conceited students’, it also risked
lessening ‘the chance that, in teachers, we shall have eminent philoso-
phers, 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 pub-
lishing 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.
240  G. WHITELEY

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 enam-
oured by German philosophy, specifically giving Schelling as an example
of a thinker who had not stood the test of time, having ‘bubbled, bab-
bled, and passed away’ (1854: 61); on the other hand, only two pages
later, Vaughan mobilized the name of Schelling as exemplary when not-
ing 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 communi-
cating 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, pro-
duced 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
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  241

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’ lec-
turing. 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 ‘lay-

man’, 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 con-
sists 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),
242  G. WHITELEY

but rather to develop ‘the whole mind and character of the scholar’, one
which had been expanded by ‘his academic pursuits, fitting him the bet-
ter 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 com-
prehensiveness, 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 testimo-
nial 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 educa-
tion for women in Britain. In his introductory lecture, Scott made the
case that a versing in Schelling should be an important element of wom-
en’s education. Since Schelling ‘appeal[s] not merely to the intellectual,
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  243

but to the spiritual man’, Scott believed that his philosophy, like that
of Plato or Plotinus, had been unfairly marginalised in all-male educa-
tional 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 prac-
tical 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 think-
ers such as Jowett and Stanley, University College was from its incep-
tion 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 stud-
ied 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 transi-
tion 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 conclud-
ing that ‘of all philosophers, Schelling may be mentioned as at present
244  G. WHITELEY

entertaining views more in harmony […] with the doctrines of revela-

tion’ (1834: 1: 191).
While Hoppus shows a grasp of the contours of post-Kantian phi-
losophy in this work, he does not demonstrate any first hand acquaint-
ance 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 ingenu-
ity, 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 representa-
tive 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 philoso-
phy after 1800 (Hicks 1928: 470–471). To offer not one, but two lec-
ture 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 dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth century. In it, Sedgwick roundly
attacked idealism, quoting William Hodge Mill on Schelling’s pantheism,
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  245

‘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 con-
tact 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, hav-
ing 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 read-
ing 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 holi-
daying (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
246  G. WHITELEY

although this movement led to an increased interest in German philos-

ophy 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 ideal-
ists 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 philoso-
phy 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 edu-
cated 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-be-
numbing 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 philo-
sophical debates in Britain. For Kirk Willis, Stirling’s book amounts to
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  247

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 his-
tory of nineteenth-century German philosophy. Stirling begins specula-
tively 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 ide-
alism had come to an end. ‘The whole thing had been but an intellec-
tual 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 lec-
tures, 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 argumen-
tum 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 irre-
deemably 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 poten-
tial 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
248  G. WHITELEY

his text presents Hegel as a somewhat unlikeable figure, cold and cal-
culating, 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 itiner-

ant lower-class hustler like Dickens’ Dr. Marigold. Schelling, by compar-
ison, 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 exasper-
ated 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 col-
leagues. Green had entered Balliol in 1855 and come under the influ-
ence 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
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  249

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 fig-
ures 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 lec-
turer to Hamilton in his younger days and later becoming his biogra-
pher, 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 him-
self 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
250  G. WHITELEY

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 ‘lib-
erty 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 stu-
dents 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 modifica-
tions of consciousness which we invest with externality are really pro-
duced 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
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  251

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 philoso-
pher 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 con-

ceived 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
252  G. WHITELEY

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 scien-
tist, 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 pri-
mary interest in the Prolegomena is ultimately Hegel, but Schelling is
given more of a hearing in these pages than anywhere else in the pub-
lished works of the British idealists. Wallace confesses that ‘an involun-
tary 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 sys-
tems, 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
 9  SCHELLING AND THE BRITISH UNIVERSITIES  253

bounded up with his own reading of Schelling and Hegel, Wallace char-
acterises Schelling’s treatment of life as nothing more than ‘an instru-
ment 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
254  G. WHITELEY

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.

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———. 1892. Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 2 vols. Glasgow: James
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 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 phi-
losophy’ (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 257

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Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_10
258  G. WHITELEY

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 phi-
losophy of mythology were less frequent than those dealing with his
Naturphilosophie. After the initial notice of ‘Über Mythen’, the first pub-
lished 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 impor-
tant 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 explica-
tions of the names of deities arises from the multiplicity of the attrib-
utes of each deity’, should be treated as ‘reasonable rules’ (1816: 60).
But as the review continues, it becomes clear that some of the conclu-
sions Schelling had drawn from these rules, along with the evidence he
had marshalled, were deemed more problematic. The reviewer was par-
ticularly concerned with Schelling’s discussion of monotheism, holding
that the ‘idea of an empty Monotheism, allowing to God but one sep-
arate 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,
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  259

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 lec-
ture ‘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 exist-
ence, from being actualised’, could be conceived of as a kind of ‘long-
ing’, ‘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 some-
thing 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 philos-
ophy, 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 coin-
age ‘tautegory’ in his late lectures on mythology. ‘Mythology is not
allegorical; it is tautegorical’, Schelling writes: ‘To mythology, the gods
260  G. WHITELEY

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 simili-
tudes, 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 phi-
losophy 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 some-

thing 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:
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  261

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 particu-
larly 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, crit-
icized 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 […] expres-
sions 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 tautegori-
cal 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 phi-
losophy of revelation, and perhaps the only important post-Romantic
thinker to address Schelling’s work on mythology during this decade
262  G. WHITELEY

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 edi-
tor. 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 theol-
ogy 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 chan-
nels 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 com-

mon misconception regarding Schelling’s religion, as we saw in Chapter 7),
before employing the standard post-Romantic rhetorical move of associat-
ing 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 mythol-
ogy 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)
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  263

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 [1780-

1856] 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)
264  G. WHITELEY

From the outset, Schelling appears to have recognised something spe-

cial 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 refer-
ring 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 occu-
pied 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 dil-
igently and with great interest’, noting that ‘his philosophy has some-
thing Oriental about it. I am translating the Kathâka Upanishad for him
with great diligence’ (1902: 1: 25; see also 1901: 471).6 These recol-
lections 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 mythol-
ogy 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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  265

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 encour-
aged 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 transla-
tion 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 mythol-
ogy 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 mythol-
ogy had rather been sunk in Lethe, than that this great thinker had suf-
fered 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
266  G. WHITELEY

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 dis-
cuss 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 respec-
tive 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 ref-
erence 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 dis-
appointed’ 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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  267

his intuitive understanding of the centrality of mythology to philosophy,

writing in 1871 that the

stream of modern philosophic thought has ended where ancient philos-

ophy 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 hap-
pened 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 pro-

nounce 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
268  G. WHITELEY

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 cri-
tique 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 com-
parative 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 met-
aphysical discussions, must be carefully distinguished, and which for prac-
tical 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 mono-

theism’ 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 phe-
nomenon of nature into thought’ (1897: 1: x); in his understanding
of the way in which mythology is an expression of language; and in his
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  269

understanding that the nation was formed at the moment when lan-
guage 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 establish-
ment 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 develop-
ment of language to the development of mythology. Noting his upbring-
ing in ‘an intellectual atmosphere permeated by the ideas of development
and historical growth’ (1887: 92), Müller found the theory of ‘evolu-
tion’ 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 conscious-
ness. For both Schelling and Müller, language seeks to express the ineffa-
ble 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 devel-
opment 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
270  G. WHITELEY

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 com-
munal’ (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 his-
tory 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 estab-
lished, 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.
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  271

The appeal to Schelling here is to an authority who has been misunder-

stood. To Müller, Gladstone’s scholarship was too ‘enthusiastic’, one
which failed to pay sufficient attention to the historical facts which com-
parative 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 recom-
mended it to Francis Turner Palgrave:

[Schelling] shows a mind ‘sensitive to every breath’ of beauty, and combin-

ing 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 com-
ments are significant since they speak to the ways in which he might have
introduced other undergraduates to his aesthetics. One such undergrad-
uate 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 through-
out 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 galva-
nised in the mid-century by the publication of Johnson’s English trans-
lation 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 aesthet-
icism 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
272  G. WHITELEY

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 inter-
ested 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 atten-
tion 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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  273

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 distin-
guished 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 inex-
pressible refinements of change. Things pass into their opposites by accu-
mulation 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 ques-
tions 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 ‘per-

manent truth and importance’ of either Coleridge or Schelling or both
may be characterised in this manner. Regardless, however, Schelling is
274  G. WHITELEY

clearly deemed a ‘mystic’ in these passages, one whose own ‘sickly’ phi-
losophy led Coleridge astray.
It is hardly surprising to find that Pater’s essay touches on the ques-
tion 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 ear-
lier origin than any of them. (1910a: 75)15

One assumes that Jowett had regaled Pater as a student with his recol-
lections 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 intel-
ligence of man may be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek specula-
tion. (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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  275

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 dis-
cussed 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 aestheti-
cism 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 channel-
ling Schelling, who in the Akademierede writes: ‘when the artist seizes
the aspect and essence of the idea, and produces that, he forms the indi-
vidual 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
276  G. WHITELEY

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 mythol-
ogy, 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 dou-
ble 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 post-
humously 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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  277

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 contra-

ries”. 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 dis-
cussion 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 ‘indif-
ference’, 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 neces-
sity, 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 sor-
row. A reader who knew the allusion to Schelling would be able to see
Gaston’s distance from Bruno precisely through this experience of ‘sor-
row’, and would be in the position to unpack the subtle passing allusion
to ‘another distinction’. It turns Gaston into a melancholic, shrouded in
278  G. WHITELEY

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 corol-
lary of his own philosophy.20
Thus Pater’s sadness, a quality which today is sometimes forgot-
ten in the standard narratives of British intellectual history. Instead,
Pater is remembered for the aesthetic hedonism advocated in the con-
clusion 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 court-
ing 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 elec-
tion to Brasenose. Pater begins with a focus on ‘physical life’ as ‘per-
petual 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 per-
manence (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 determi-
nate 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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  279

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 explica-
tion of the imagery of the stream:

A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resist-

ance. Where there is resistance – a whirlpool forms. Every original product
of nature is such a whirlpool, every organism. The whirlpool is not some-
thing 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 dis-
cussing 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’, some-
thing which exists in the diaphanous space ‘between form and the form-
less’, 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).
280  G. WHITELEY

What is at stake in Pater’s aesthetic philosophy, which privileges the fleet-

ing instant of forming impressions, is exactly a question of ‘verschwin-
den’, ‘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 fig-
ure, matriculating in 1866, before he became a Fellow of University
College, Oxford, in 1870. He studied under Jowett, but was more influ-
enced by Green and by Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846–1892), becom-
ing 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 philos-
opher of the first rank who had dealt fully’ with aesthetics (1923: 570).
As with most of the other figures associated with British ideal-
ism, 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, pref-
acing it with a critical introduction. But in his A History of Æesthetic,
Bosanquet argued that most, if not all, of Hegel’s most significant aes-
thetic 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 discov-
ered’ (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 philoso-
phy’ (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
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  281

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 under-
standing 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 nat-
ural 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 inter-
est 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).
282  G. WHITELEY

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 arrange-
ment’ 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 com-
pare’, Bosanquet concludes: ‘But soon the reader finds that he is an
untrustworthy guide; impatient, incoherent, credulous, with no ster-
ling 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 man-
ner 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 knowl-
edge and of ‘logical criticism’ (1824: 371).
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  283

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 henothe-
ism 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 pub-
lished work: see Müller (1887: 45).
9. Through Müller, the idea became popularised in later Victorian intellec-
tual 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 pas-
sages 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).
284  G. WHITELEY

17. In a recent paper on ‘Walter Pater’s archetype of the arts: transcenden-

tal 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 com-
ment 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 develop-
ment, 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 actu-
ally embodying the intelligence, as a <the> body the <a> soul, lives on
from Bruno […] to reappear in Schelling’s philosophy of the “identity”
[…] which again has its purely political equivalent in Wordsworth’s pecu-
liar apprehension of the natural world as animated by an inherent intelli-
gence 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).
 10  SCHELLING IN BRITISH MYTHOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC LITERATURE  285

22. ‘The representation of a divine being was to the Greek not a mere sym-
bol, 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).

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 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 attempt-
ing 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 judg-
ment 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 philosoph-
ical reply to his former friend, taking the form of his new positive phi-
losophy, 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 phil-
osophical 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 289

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1_11
290  G. WHITELEY

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 philos-
ophy. As Schelling put it, ‘the science that accomplishes [the] elimina-
tion 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 under-
write lived experience in the world. The philosophical issue lies in the
fact that such a negative philosophy ‘brings itself only so far as the logi-
cally 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 logi-
cal 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 foun-
dations 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 contempo-
rary 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 pre-
dominantly 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
 11  TOWARDS A MODERN READING OF SCHELLING  291

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 fasci-
nated 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 posi-
tive 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 pos-
itive 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 investiga-
tions, 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 mythol-
ogy 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
292  G. WHITELEY

in part by his reading of Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, he charac-

terises 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 fab-
ric of existence in an ‘orgasm of forces’, to use Žižek’s memorable phras-
ing (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
 11  TOWARDS A MODERN READING OF SCHELLING  293

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 prin-
ciple 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 fig-
ure 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 virtu-
ally no English-language references to Schelling’s novella Clara during
the nineteenth century, but when the British discussed animal mag-
netism, Schelling’s name was often brought into the equation, if some-
what 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 the-
ology. 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 dur-
ing 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 corre-
spondent ‘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
294  G. WHITELEY

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, how-
ever, 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 nineteenth-
century 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 asso-
ciated. 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 ‘commi-
nuted’ 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 nine-
teenth century German philosophy, and his son likewise caught the tran-
scendental bug. William James records an intensive period of ‘reading of
the revival, or rather the birth, of German literature’ in 1869, includ-
ing literature about Schelling, if no definitive evidence of any titles by
him (James 1920: 1: 141). Regardless, James seems to have been influ-
enced, 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
 11  TOWARDS A MODERN READING OF SCHELLING  295

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 trans-
formed 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 shift-
ing 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 ‘pulver-
ised’ 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 occa-
sionally direct, but more often diffuse, as we saw in the introduc-
tion 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 misun-
derstood 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
296  G. WHITELEY

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 mean-
ing’ (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 criti-
cal 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 metamor-
phoses’: ‘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
 11  TOWARDS A MODERN READING OF SCHELLING  297

hostile to Hegel, Schelling’s theory of potencies had been vastly misun-

derstood 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 dif-
ference out of the night of the Identical, and with finer, more varied and
more terrifying flashes of lightening than those of contradiction: with pro-
gressivity. (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 differ-
entiation 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 empha-

sises a theory of difference, of Schelling the philosopher of potencies
and forces, reminds us of a number of the ways in which his philoso-
phy 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 over-
flowing 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
298  G. WHITELEY

Perhaps surprisingly, then, we find in Deleuze’s transcendental empiri-

cism 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 encoun-
tered 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 philoso-
phy still seems able to say and do. Through Deleuze and the interpre-
tation 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 eco-
logical 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 antic-
ipated, ‘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 hybrid-
ized. 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 understand-
ing of his new positive philosophy, it was an event which the periodi-
cal 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
 11  TOWARDS A MODERN READING OF SCHELLING  299

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-be-
made 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 interloc-
utors who responded to his thought would have envisaged. In philoso-
phy, 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 com-
parative 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 recep-
tion 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 his-
tory 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).
300  G. WHITELEY

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 associa-
tion 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 transcen-
dentalist’ (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 Psycho-
analysis] (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 writ-
ten 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).

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 Index

A Alford, Henry, 197

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
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 303

G. Whiteley, Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95906-1
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 Böhme, Jakob, 4, 5, 8–11, 27, 49, 51,
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
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

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
Index   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 Knochen-
und 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 spekula-
tiven 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 philos-
ophie, 159
Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 159, 260

D E
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
Index   307
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; transcen-
dental morphology
existentialism, 21
308  Index
F Frank, Manfred, 21
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
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

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 Theodore, or, The Enthusiast, 139
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
Index   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
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

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 246, 249, 250, 253, 289. See also
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
Index   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,
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 154–156, 211, 215, 217, 231,
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,
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

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
Index   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 prin-
ciples 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 Noel, Roden, 164–166
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
‘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

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 Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob,
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
Index   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
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 geschichtli-
chen 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 Platen-
Hallermünde), 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

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
Index   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 Opium-
Eater, 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; heno-
theism; pantheism; pietism;
revelation; theology; theoso-
phy; 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

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
Index   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 zusammenhängen-
den 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 insbe-
sondere, 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; mag-
netism; 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

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
Index   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 188, 190, 198, 243
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 reli-
gion; 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,
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,

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 Weiss, Christian Samuel, 135, 263
Vaughan, Henry Halford, 240, 241
Veitch, John, 66–68, 75, 89, 249
Venables, George Stovin, 145
Venetianer, Moritz
Der Allgeist, 293
Vermittlungstheologie (mediation the-
ology), 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 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,
Wagner, Johann Jakob, 38, 39
Index   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
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
221, 222
324  Index

White, Thomas, 54 Wordsworth, William, 6, 50, 158, 193,

Wilberforce, Samuel, 196 220, 284
Wilde, Oscar, 278 Excursion, 70
Wilkinson, James John Garth, 294 ‘Laodamia’, 169
William, Joseph, 226 Worsley, Thomas, 140
Williams, L. Pearce, 209, 212, 216 meets Schelling, 140
Willis, Kirk, 246 Wright, Thomas (minister of
Wilson, George, 191, 192 Borthwick), 190
Wilson, John (Christopher North), 66, True Plan of a Living Temple, 190
67, 89, 101, 106, 191 Wright, Thomas (Pater’s biographer),
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 141 272
Winkelmann, August Stephan, 40
Wirth, Jason M., 15, 16, 19, 22, 28,
291 Z
Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas, 163 Žižek, Slavoj, 22, 292
Wolf, Friedrich August, 283
Woolf, Virginia, 278, 294
Wordsworth, Christopher, 140, 147