This was the opposite of Newton’s automata-like universe that was ruled by natural laws. ‘Philosophy applied to nature’, Schelling said, ‘has to raise it up out of the dead mechanistic world it appears to be caught in.’ The natural world was no longer God’s well-ordered clockwork or a piece of divine artistry – it was alive.
I wish I'd discovered writings like this when I was much younger. It would have been wonderful for my college-age and young adult self to have been able to ponder and explore this.
