assertion which we already know could be made that the sole possible system is Spinozism. The originator of this "striking" view is Jacobi. Schelling does not fail to point out the hidden, more far-reaching intention of this view. The intention is to warn everyone by way of an inquisition about philosophy in general as something "ruinous." For as fatalism, Spinozism is atheism and every upright person must cross himself when confronted with this.
Fundamentally, Schelling wants to say: it was all right for the "German temper" (Gemüt) to defend itself against the dominance of the Western mechanistic way of thinking. However, it is not sufficient, but ruinous in the opposite direction, to appeal to that temper instead of opposing a confused thinking with the hardness and precision of a more primordial and correct thinking. Spirit (Gemüt) can and must be the foundation from which thinking and knowing get their motive. But it must not become a place of refuge to be blindly sought, a place which one demands instead of growing with its help into the bread th of what is creative, and that always means what gives measure. Spirit, yes, but the resting place of thinking and knowing—no. Schelling says later (I, X, 199; 5, 269):
"Truly universal philosophy cannot possibly be the property of a single nation. As long as a philosophy does not go beyond the limits of an individual people, one can confidently assume that it is not yet the true philosophy although i t may be on its way."
Thus it was also truly German that Jacobi's appeals "to the heart, the inner feelings and faith" did not prevail, but that the "higher light of Idealism", that is, a more strict thinking, came about and gained control in that Idealism which is therefore called German—a higher kind of thinking which received essential inspiration from Leibniz and a first true foundation in Kant.
That kind of pantheism, that is, that system which, as we have already seen, not only does not deny freedom, but requires it, is founded in the higher kind of thinking of Idealism—it is Idealism. Thus, the "system of freedom" has al ready been secured with Idealism, and Idealism has already been expressed as a system of freedom when it has formed a system. Idealism as a system was founded by Fichte's doctrine of science, substantially complemented by Schelling's philosophy of nature, raised by his system of transcendental Idealism to a higher level, completed by his system of identity and explicitly founded in a self-contained train of thought by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Then why raise the question of the system of freedom again? Schelling says: (p. 24): "However, high as we have been placed in this respect by Idealism, and certain as it is that we owe to it the first formally perfect concept of freedom, Idealism itself is, after all, nothing less than a finished system. And as soon as we seek to enter into the