 Why synthetize these seemingly opposed philosophical projects—a form of idealism with realism, indeterminism with determinism, and dualism with monism? Briefly, in Fichte, the romantics found a philosopher that took the Kantian insight about the absolute value of freedom a step further, and in Spinoza, one who recognized the genuine monistic structure of the universe, where the mental (in the form of reason and subjectivity, the seats of freedom) is the flipped side of the physical (in the form of matter and objectivity). If nature itself is both physical and mental, if it has a soul or reason and a body, then, it differs from human beings only in degree, not in kind. Natural phenomena and human beings are simply different manifestations of an encompassing nature, which is therefore nothing other than Spirit: “Nature should be visible spirit, and spirit should be invisible nature” (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, SW 2: 56).