79 [175] SPRING [Spring fragment from K. F. A. Schelling’s first single edition, 1862. Text in square brackets preceded by / denotes a different word in the Schröter edition of the spring fragment. Text in square brackets not preceded by / indicates additional text in the Schröter edition. Text in pointed brackets is text that is not found at all in the Schröter edition.]1 O, Spring, time of longing, with what a zest for life you fill the heart! On the one hand, we are drawn to the spirit realm insofar as we feel that true bliss can exist only in that greatest profundity of life; on the other hand, with its thousandfold magic, nature calls heart and senses alike [176] back into the external life. Is it not hard that neither the internal nor the external alone satisfies us and that yet so few are capable of uniting them both within themselves! Yet it is fundamentally only one and the same life in different forms. Why can’t these two forms be at the same time, and our fate be a single united life from the very beginning ? You say it was man’s own fault that they were separated and I must believe you, for I can see no other explanation for it. But won’t they ever both be at the same time? Are they separated forever? Won’t the time ever come when the internal will be completely embodied in the external, the external fully transfigured into the internal, together representing only one indestructible life? [ (where the external will be completely suffused by the internal and the internal fills the soul of the external?) New paragraph] Or won’t [/will] everything within extant nature be completed [some day] through three levels? Isn’t the first of nature’s powers [itself only] responsible merely for the individual, egotistical existence of things and doesn’t another counteract it from the very beginning that [effects ] the spiritualization, profundity, and unity of its being, [/?] until at the highest level both powers emerge reconciled in one and the same essence, and an organic, continually active life emerges that is open to everything and yet exists for itself? Don’t [177] these very same powers, which still emerge as separate and conflicting in inorganic beings, emerge united and in accord in organic ones? And, in a higher sense, isn’t it these very same powers that maintain the conflict in our current life; and in this respect aren’t we actually standing just at the very first stage of life? Isn’t the spiritualizing power victorious in death and won’t we thereby be placed at a higher stage or potency? [new paragraph] But doesn’t the actually organic level ever come about within the larger course of nature, a level that nature, nevertheless, does attain within the smaller circle of the lower life? Shouldn’t [just] those very same three [stages or] potencies that we see here, more or less at the same time and side by side, also [on the whole appear emerging] one after the other and shouldn’t there be the same sequence of stages in time that we perceive here in space? And what then would come of that threefold unity of soul, body, and spirit;[/,] or what would come of a completion if [as is claimed, here,] in the present life the corporeal [were dominant and] held spirit and soul prisoner, as it were,[/;] if in the condition after death the spirit would be free,[/;] if the soul, however, would never rise to its true essence? For the soul will rule only when the powers that are still currently in conflict here, when spirit and body are completely reconciled[,] when the forms are one and the same undivided [and thus also truly perfectly blessed] life. Bliss [178] is freedom and the rule of the soul. It is impossible for this condition to be complete bliss when the soul is subordinated to the spirit and the body is devoured by its opposite. It is impossible to believe that this wholly corporeal nature appeared from nothing just in order forever to return to nothing some day and to believe that only the spiritual life should be everlasting. Corporeality is not imperfection, but when the body is suffused by the soul, then it is perfection in its plenitude. The merely spiritual life doesn’t satisfy our heart.2 There is something in us that desires a...