As Michael Vater puts it, the solution ‘is extra-systematic since on the Fichtean model of consciousness—an activity ever-deflected from complete reflection into unconscious and preconscious production—a fully transparent philosophical moment of self-reflection is not possible’.

Schelling offers little assistance in explaining what to make of this, though in general terms it reflects a useful conception of art as the one human activity that imitates and symbolises the divine act of creation.

In addition, since in Schelling there is not actually a final identity of subject and object, what really runs his system is the will, a blind drive towards self-instantiation which belongs within Kant's noumenal sphere, and about which accordingly nothing further can be said.

[citation needed] Schelling's argument was adopted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, where he said: 'DES CARTES, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe....

In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.

[15] However, with half of the Biographia already printed, Coleridge realised that his proposed modifications were not going to work, a crisis he solved by inventing a 'letter from a friend' advising him to skip the deduction and move straight to the conclusion.