Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and influential of German philosophers. In this book, S. J. McGrath not only makes Schelling's ideas accessible to a general audience, he uncovers the romantic philosopher's seminal role as the creator of a concept which shaped and defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century the concept of the unconscious. McGrath shows how the unconscious originally functioned in Schelling's philosophy as a bridge between nature and spirit. Before Freud revised the concept to fit his psychopathology, the unconscious was understood largely along Schellingian lines as primarily a source of creative power. Schelling's life-long effort to understand intuitive and non-reflective forms of intelligence in nature, humankind and the divine has been revitalised by Jungians, as well as by archetypal and trans-personal psychologists. With the new interest in the unconscious today, Schelling's ideas have never been more relevant. The Dark Ground of Spirit will therefore be essential reading for those involved in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and philosophy, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of ideas.

In this work Professor Worringer approaches a familiar subject from a new and unfamiliar angle. Since the time of Napoleon’s campaign and the interest aroused by the explorations conducted by his command, a glamour as of something surpassing beyond measure, in grandeur and aloofness, any other of the visible works of man, has been cast upon the art of Ancient Egypt. The frame of mind in which this art has habitually been contemplated is tainted with the romantic wonder that belongs to all things very ancient or distant; this attitude is indeed not very different, as Professor Worringer points out, from the earlier traditional attitude towards Egypt, inherited from classical antiquity—one of superstitious veneration for something mysterious, magical, and almost superhuman. Nor have the events attending quite recent discoveries, with their appeal to the popular appetite for the sensational, by any means diminished the atmosphere of unreality by which, for the world at large, the early ages of Egyptian history are surrounded.