System of Transcendental Idealism

The most systematic book of the young Schelling, published in 1800 while he was teaching at Jena among the early Romantics and was still allied with Fichte. It sets out to show how the objective world arises from the activity of the self, as the counterpart to his philosophy of nature, which moved in the opposite direction, from nature to mind. Taking self-consciousness as its first principle, the theoretical part traces a 'history of self-consciousness' through a series of epochs, from sensation to productive intuition, then to reflection and finally the free act of will. The practical part treats freedom, law and history, which Schelling sees as a gradual revelation of the absolute. A section on purposiveness in nature follows. The book ends with the philosophy of art: in the work of genius, conscious and unconscious activity are united, and art becomes the 'organon' of philosophy, showing in an object what philosophy can only think.

It marks the turn from Fichte's idealism towards the Romantic view that art, not argument, gives the deepest access to reality, an idea that runs through later aesthetics.