EXCERPTS & QUOTES

Why is there something rather
than nothing? - Schelling
Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature - Schelling
Come to physics, and see the Eternal - Schelling
Reason does not have the idea of God, it is this idea,
and nothing else - Schelling
History is an epic composed in the mind of God  - Schelling
…withdrawing into ourselves, the perceiving self merges in the self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time, or rather eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no longer an object for us, but is lost in us – Schelling
The  World Spirit has had the patience to pass through these forms in the long expanse of time, taking upon itself the tremendous labor of world history – Georg Hegel
…by the age of eleven he had not only learned six languages, but...had already begun to read Plato in Greek - Bruce Matthews
Schelling, appointed in 1798 at the age of 23 to the University of Jena, quickly rose to prominence as, if not the ringleader of the Jena romantics, their philosophical spokesman, and soon thereafter, as the foremost thinker in post-Kantian German philosophy. Treatise after treatise flowed from his pen...After a brief honeymoon, in which Fichte assumed that Schelling would be his disciple, Schelling began to construct a new kind of realism from within transcendental idealism (which he had mastered by the time he was 23) - S. J. McGrath
Schelling held that the divisions imposed on nature, by our ordinary perception and thought, do not have absolute validity. They should be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative energy which is the soul or inner aspect of nature. In other words he was a proponent of a variety of organicism. The dynamic series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces; light, with its subordinate processes (magnetism, electricity, and chemical action); organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility. The continual change presented to us by experience, taken together with the thought of unity in productive force of nature, leads to the conception of the duality through which nature expresses itself in its varied products - Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia (Entry on Naturphilosophie)
Unconsciousness vs Consciousness
His [Schelling's] whole philosophy of nature was an attempt to show the indwelling of the potential spirit in all natural objects and how it comes to its fulfillment in man…In this construction the process of nature proceeds from the lowest to the highest forms of nature, and finally to man in terms of a contrast between two principles. He called one principle the unconscious and the other the conscious. He tried to show how slowly in all different forms of nature consciousness develops until it comes to man where it becomes self-consciousness – Paul Tillich (Systematic Theology)
Building on the premise that philosophy cannot ultimately explain existence, he merges the earlier philosophies of Nature and identity with his newfound belief in a fundamental conflict between a dark unconscious principle and a conscious principle in God. God makes the universe intelligible by relating to the ground of the real but, insofar as nature is not complete intelligence, the real exists as a lack within the ideal and not as reflective of the ideal itself. The three universal ages — distinct only to us but not in the eternal God — therefore comprise a beginning where the principle of God before God is divine will striving for being, the present age, which is still part of this growth and hence a mediated fulfillment, and a finality where God is consciously and consummately Himself to Himself - Christopher John Murray (Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850)
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson, whose Deux sources de la morale et de la religion is described as having been written “strongly under the influence of Schelling" - Jerry Day (Voegelin, Schelling & the Philosophy of Historical Existence)
Limitations of Kantian Idealism
The conclusions of transcendental idealism disappointed Schelling and Hegel alike, both of whom wanted to obtain direct knowledge of the substance of reality. Their respective attempts to provide a better account of the matter, however, eventually took dissimilar paths - ibid
Epistemology
Modern epistemology typically begins by presupposing substantial differences between the self and the world, the self and the divine, the self and other selves. This presupposition leaves the search for knowledge to focus on how to effect a union, if possible, between these substantially different things. This union, it is initially supposed, is what would be required to yield knowledge of the other by the self. Kant, Fichte and Hegel are best known for their attempts to establish this type of knowledge in the productive or synthetic union of opposites by pure thought - ibid
Subjectivism (Descartes & Fichte)
The pre-modern notion that the human soul's primary contact with visible reality is what constitutes the common ground of knowledge for all is replaced by Kant's self-proclaimed Copernican revolution in thought, where an apriori structure of the human mind becomes the center and relatively private ground of knowledge with respect to the natural world. Kant expands a line of thought previously developed by René Descartes, among others, and prepares the way for Johann Fichte to complete this inward turn, ultimately by declaring that each human Ego is the self-positing creator of all that it experiences in itself and in the so-called natural world - ibid
To the Transcendental Philosophy, nature is nothing but the organ of self-consciousness, and everything in nature is only necessary because only through such a nature can self-consciousness be achieved - Schelling
...for Real is just that which cannot be created by mere thought - Schelling
God's Dualistic Being
God would be just be some kind of inarticulable static One if there were not that which He transcends: without opposition, Schelling argues, there is no life and no sense of development, which are the highest aspects of reality - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Entry on Schelling)
God & Evil
Being that natural evil would be the creation of God, Schelling denies its existence. In his theodicy, Schelling argues that the possibility of evil grounds itself in human beings’ free will. Made in the image of God, humans share God’s constitutive parts. Humans are distinguished from God by the severability of the bond, or unity, of these parts. This unity is necessary in God, but humans can choose to unify their constituent parts in the core, or centrum, of their being – Devon Hawkins (Schelling, Heidegger & Evil)
In no way can God be an object of knowledge; we are never outside God so that we could posit him as an object

     - Eric Voegelin
Schelling vs. Gnosticism
...ancient Gnostics despised nature and its God; they sought perfection in a God who had nothing to do with the creation of this world…the Gnostics alluded to by Voegelin were not pantheists in any sense of the term. They acknowledged only the divinity who completely transcends the world. Schelling held nature itself to be divine, not an aberration created by a pseudo-divinity - Jerry Day (Voegelin, Schelling & the Philosophy of Historical Existence)
Deeper Than Reason
…Schelling argues that there is more to human consciousness than its capacity for perceiving objects in space and time. For example, it is also possible for one to come to know that the reality of experience reveals an eternal and nonspatial quality to life, where eternity is not to be misunderstood as an extremely long time but, properly speaking, as the absence of time per se. Schelling occasionally describes this capacity of the soul with the Platonic term for recollection: anamnesis. He says that Plato understood well that the ideas, in his particular sense of the term, are not constructed by the human mind; rather, they are the instructors of the mind -  Jerry Day (Voegelin, Schelling & the Philosophy of Historical Existence)
These instructors structure (the human) mind, making it what it is. According to Schelling, Kant was unable to understand this point due to his unquestioned belief in the substantial difference between noumena and phenomena - ibid
The Godhead is not divine nature or substance, but the devouring ferocity of purity that a person is able to approach only with an equal purity. Since all Being goes up in it as if in flames, it is necessarily unapproachable to anyone still embroiled in Being - Schelling
As a highest willing of the Spirit, philosophy is intrinsically a will to self-transcendence, confronting the boundaries of beings which it transcends by questioning beyond beings through the question of Being itself - Schelling
Schelling’s Being-in-the-World
Schelling is asking his readers to recall the following points from experience: Every human being lives in a meaningful and mysterious world before he or she begins to interpret or differentiate the “world” and its many “things.” All consciously human life begins without reflective self-consciousness. Stated positively, consciousness precedes self-consciousness. Accordingly, the latter is no ground upon which an absolute system of knowledge could ever be built: “In truth, there does not ever nor anywhere exist a subject, a self, or any object or non-self - Jerry Day
Subjects & Objects
Schelling abandons the ego cogitans of Descartes, at least as the ground of consciousness, and rediscovers that “the ego is not an ultimate entity with faculties of reasoning but a medium through which the substance of the universe [or God] is operating in its processes." In the knowledge of God, there is for Schelling no subject or object of knowledge; there is instead the life of the divine substance, animating the world and man as part of the world - ibid
Schelling maintains that the absolute identity of all things precedes discursive or reflective thought; it is the Prius to which all reflection stands in formal opposition - Jerry Day

It is not because of thinking that there is being, but because of being that there is thinking - ibid
…the presupposition that the human mind and the rest of reality are substantially different, or, otherwise said, that the difference between “subjects” of cognition and “objects” of knowledge is a substantial one - Schelling
…nature becomes spirit-like and spirit becomes nature-like, and the opposition seems to dissolve in a compensation – Martin Heidegger
Non-Dualism
...in Schelling's symbolization of the absolute, such antitheses are not conceivable as indications of substantial differences between things. There is no night opposed to day, no cows opposed to non-cows, no black opposed to white. Rather, Schelling attempts to call attention to the substantial identity of absolutely everything - Jerry Day
In man there exists the whole power of the principle of darkness and, in him too, the whole force of light. In him there are both centers, the deepest pit and the highest heaven. Man's will is the seed concealed in eternal longing of God, present as yet only in the depths the divine light of life locked in the depths which God divined when he determined to will nature – Schelling 
Primordial Thoughts
…as discussed in the works of Schelling, consciousness always precedes self-conscious reflection. The unconscious and eternal present is the condition of the possibility for the experience of a temporal “flow.” The “I” is discovered to be a derivative phenomenon, constituted in the same way as the experience of a temporal flow, for the conscious “I” rests upon an otherwise “inaccessible” ground of unconscious activity. In Schelling's words, we recall, the “I” is little more than a “vain habit"  - Jerry Day
...Voegelin and Schelling agree that mythic symbols arise from the soul's unconscious depth and break forth into the conscious articulation of experiences. But they also agree that what holds true for mythic symbols is true of linguistic symbolization in general - ibid
...it is inconceivable that consciousness can be the ground of language; and so the more we penetrate its nature, the more we acquire the certitude that it transcends by its profundity any conscious creation - Schelling
Discoverer of the Unconscious
…we find in Schelling the conception of the Unconscious in its full purity, clearness and depth – Eduard von Hartmann (Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. 1)
This eternally Unconscious, which, as were it the eternal sun in the kingdom of spirits, is hidden by its own untroubled light, and although itself never becoming Object, impresses its identity on all free actions, is withal the same for all intelligents, the invisible root of which all intelligences are only the powers, and the eternal mediator between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or intuited, at once the ground of conformity to law in freedom, and of freedom in conformity to law - Schelling
Voegelin’s Critique of Jung
Voegelin seems to have Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in mind as the subjects of his later critique, for he criticizes the practice of populating the soul's depth with “libidinous dynamics” and the “archetypes” of a “collective unconscious.” This practice is said to misconstrue the essentially elusive character of the unconscious in an attempt to gain “by fornicatio fantastica an absolute which a critical analysis of experience will not deliver”… The unconscious remains in its unfathomable depth beyond consciousness, Voegelin maintains. It may have libidinous dynamics all its own, but these cannot be exhaustively exposed or controlled by systems of reflective psychoanalysis or philosophy, systems that seek to eradicate the depth qua depth - Jerry Day
History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute - Schelling
Voegelin on Primary Understanding
…in all of his later work, Voegelin frequently uses the term anamnesis to describe the primary function of consciousness with respect to its knowledge of reality and itself. His use of the term implies, as it did in Schelling, that reality is not constructed by a completely self-transparent ego in reflective modes of consciousness but is remembered when formative experiences of an individual's consciousness are re-collected, thus revealing the order (and disorder) of its discreet existence. The formative experiences to which Voegelin appeals do not originate in self-conscious reflection. They occur spontaneously, in the immediacy of an actual life. The formative experiences become “objects” of consciousness only upon subsequent reflection, when they are intentionally brought into memory or, as it were, assert themselves as memories - Jerry Day
Everything finite resists change and development to some degree and organizes itself around a static center, a knot of inert identity; at the same time it harbors within it an impulse toward infinite development that impels it out of itself in the direction of endless self-differentiation. If these opposed tendencies were equal, they would cancel each other out; therefore, disequilibrium must be built into the equation. Life is disequilibrium, not balance. “The immediate goal of nature…is the process itself, nothing other than the constant disturbance and restoration of the equilibrium of the negative principle in the body: what develops out of this process [the individual] is accidental to the process" - Schelling
In freedom there shall be necessity...Through freedom itself, and in that I think to act freely, there shall unconsciously, i.e., without my assistance, come to pass what I did not intend - Schelling