📖 - Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph — The Deepest Night of the Past

:: Of Origins & Ends

Man must be granted an essence outside and above the world; for how could he alone, of all creatures, retrace the long path of developments from the present back into the deepest night of the past, how could he alone rise up to the beginning of things unless there were in him an essence from the beginning of times? Drawn from the source of things and akin to it, what is eternal of the soul has a co-science/con-sciousnes [Mitt-Wissenschaft] of creation.

Because this essence holds time enveloped, it serves as a link that enables man to make an immediate connection with the most ancient past as well as with the most distant future. Man often sees himself transported into such wonderful relations and inner connections through precisely this innermost essence, such as wehn he encounters a moment in the present as one long past, or a distant event, as if he himself were witness to it.