Abstract

Schelling used the word ›construction‹ to indicate an account that located a phenomenon within the whole, and thus explained it from the whole. This paper considers the place of nature within Fichte’s original system - as expounded in the 1794 Foundations of the Whole Theory of Science and the 1795 Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Theory of Science - and raises the question of the explanatory function of nature within transcendental idealism. Nature is deduced, or ›constructed‹ in Schelling’s term, in section four of the Foundations, the theoretical part of the Theory of Science. That deduction furnishes us the concept of nature as necessary and independent of us, but shows how it is permeated by lawfulness, which is the work of mind. Nature is the object correlated with intelligence, the I as dependent on the not-I.