On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) used Romanticist
enthusiasm to combat Enlightenment rationalism. The Berlin Deist circle did
not fade away without a battle: Mendelssohn tried to refute Kant’s arguments
against a rational proof of God; Nicolai, a veteran who had mounted satirical
attacks on Goethe, Hamann, Lavater, Herder, and Jacobi, in the 1790s accused
Kant and Fichte of being crypto-Catholics (Beiser, 1987: 105–108). But Deism
fell from fashion, squeezed out of the attention space by the new lines of
conflict. In the end, Mendelssohn’s daughter married Friedrich Schlegel, carry-
ing a connection with the prestige and creative energy of the Aufklärer into
the camp of their Romantic opponents.
The Idealists, now proliferating even faster than the Kantians, soon under-
went their own sub-splits. Schelling, originally one of Fichte’s disciples, in
1797–1800 turned philosophy to encompass the forefront of research in natu-
ral science. Magnetism and electricity had been hot areas of scientific discovery
from Galvani in the 1780s through Volta’s electric cell in 1799. For Schelling,
what appears as the objects of nature are dynamic processes based on attrac-
tion and repulsion, paralleling Fichte’s dialectic of consciousness positing and
resolving oppositions. Chemistry was theorized around the polarity of acids
and bases, mechanics as quantitative oppositions of forces, biological life as
the unrestricted struggle of these forces. The universe is a world Soul, a unity
of mutually conflicting forces. In astronomy the cosmos was theorized as
the periodic expansion and contraction of the Urmaterie, primary matter.
Schelling’s Naturphilosophie attracted many followers among German scien-
tists from the early 1800s through the 1820s, affecting biological studies even
among scientists who later returned to the materialist fold.^9
Ever sensitive to the unfolding of network opportunities, Schelling moved
on to other positions. Among the Weimar stars was Schiller, who capped his
reputation as a liberal dramatist by moving onto philosophical turf in 1793–
1795 and expounding a Kantian interpretation of art and poetry. Following
Schiller’s lead, in 1800, at the emotional peak of the Romantic circle, Schelling
converted to aesthetic Idealism. He now elevated the aesthetic faculty as
unifying all the other faculties of mind (rational, moral, intuitive); ultimate
metaphysical reality could be directly perceived through the eyes of the artist,
and the aesthetic perception of nature became emblematic of the highest
philosophical insight. It was in this version that Idealism became popular
abroad: spread by Coleridge (who visited Germany in 1798–99 with Words-
worth), it was adopted by the Romantic poets Shelley and Keats in England,
and later by the New England Transcendentalists. In 1801–1803 Schelling
rapidly added a religious dimension to what he now called Absolute Idealism,
giving a theological interpretation to his doctrines of nature and of aesthetic
intuition.
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^633