An important factor in this was the ascendancy of Hegel, whose mature works portray Schelling as a mere footnote in the development of idealism.

In 1792, he graduated with his master's thesis, titled Antiquissimi de prima malorum humanorum origine philosophematis Genes.

[17] After two years tutoring, in October 1798, at the age of 23, Schelling was called to University of Jena as an extraordinary professor of philosophy.

On the other hand, Schelling was unsympathetic to the ethical idealism that animated the work of Friedrich Schiller, the other pillar of Weimar Classicism.

In Jena, Schelling was on good terms with Fichte at first, but their different conceptions, about nature in particular, led to increasing divergence.

Robert Richards, however, argues in his book The Romantic Conception of Life that Schelling's interventions were most likely irrelevant, as the doctors called to the scene assured everyone involved that Auguste's disease was inevitably fatal.

Their marriage ceremony was the last occasion Schelling met his school friend the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who was already mentally ill at that time.

Hegel wrote a book titled Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie (Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, 1801), and supported Schelling's position against his idealistic predecessors, Fichte and Karl Leonhard Reinhold.

After Jena, Schelling went to Bamberg for a time, to study the Brunonian system of medicine (the theory of John Brown) with Adalbert Friedrich Marcus [de] and Andreas Röschlaub.

[21] Public attention was powerfully attracted by hints of a new system which promised something more positive, especially in its treatment of religion, than the apparent results of Hegel's teaching.

The appearance of critical writings by David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer, and the disunion in the Hegelian school itself, expressed a growing alienation from the then dominant philosophy.

In Berlin, the headquarters of the Hegelians, this found expression in attempts to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system that he was understood to have in reserve.

Its realization did not come about until 1841, when Schelling's appointment as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university.

[21] Among those in attendance at his lectures were Søren Kierkegaard (who said Schelling talked "quite insufferable nonsense" and complained that he did not end his lectures on time),[22] Mikhail Bakunin (who called them "interesting but rather insignificant"), Jacob Burckhardt, Alexander von Humboldt[23][24] (who never accepted Schelling's natural philosophy),[25] future church historian Philip Schaff[26] and Friedrich Engels (who, as a partisan of Hegel, attended to "shield the great man's grave from abuse").

The enmity of his old foe, H. E. G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling's success, led to surreptitious publication of a verbatim report of the lectures on the philosophy of revelation.

His more elaborate work, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (On the I as Principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge, 1795), while still remaining within the limits of the Fichtean idealism, showed a tendency to give the Fichtean method a more objective application, and to amalgamate Spinoza's views with it.

He contributed articles and reviews to the Philosophisches Journal of Fichte and Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and threw himself into the study of physical and medical science.

Between 1796/97, there was written a seminal manuscript now known as the Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus ("The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism").

Moreover, in this book Schelling publicly expressed his estimation of Spinoza, whose work Fichte had repudiated as dogmatism, and declared that nature and spirit differ only in their quantity, but are essentially identical.

A work of significance is the 1809 Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom), which elaborates, with increasing mysticism, on ideas in the 1804 work Philosophie und Religion (Philosophy and Religion).

The 1815 essay Ueber die Gottheiten zu Samothrake ("On the Divinities of Samothrace") was ostensibly a part of a larger work, Weltalter ("The Ages of the World"), frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which little was ever written.

Christopher John Murray describes the work as follows: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.

Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the mystics, and finally, major Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give colouring to particular works.

The dynamic series of stages in nature are matter as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces, light (with its subordinate processes of magnetism, electricity, and chemical action) and organism (with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility).

[34] Some scholars characterize Schelling as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system.

Others challenge the notion that Schelling's thought is marked by profound breaks, instead arguing that his philosophy always focused on a few common themes, especially human freedom, the absolute, and the relationship between spirit and nature.

His work impressed the English romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced his ideas into English-speaking culture, sometimes without full acknowledgment, as in the Biographia Literaria.

In the 1910s and 1920s, philosophers of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, like Wilhelm Windelband or Richard Kroner, tended to describe Schelling as an episode connecting Fichte and Hegel.

Several philosophers, including Karl Jaspers, gave presentations about the uniqueness and relevance of his thought, the interest shifting toward his later work on the origin of existence.