 The significance of the work of the early Schelling (1795–1800) lies in its attempts to give a new account of nature which, while taking account of the fact that Kant had irrevocably changed the status of nature in modern philosophy, avoids some of the consequences of Kant’s theory that were seen as problematic by Kant’s contemporaries and successors. For the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) nature is largely seen in the ‘formal’ sense, as that which is subject to necessary laws. These laws are accessible to us, Kant argues, because cognition depends on the subject bringing forms of thought, the categories, to bear on what it perceives. The problem this leads to is how the subject could fit into a nature conceived of in deterministic terms, given that the subject’s ability to know is dependent upon its ‘spontaneous’ self-caused ability to judge in terms of the categories. Kant’s response to this dilemma is to split the ‘sensuous’ realm of nature as law-bound appearance from the ‘intelligible’ realm of the subject’s cognitive and ethical self-determination. However, if the subject is part of nature there would seem to be no way of explaining how a nature which we can only know as deterministic can give rise to a subject which seems to transcend determinism in its knowing and in its self-determined actions. Kant himself sought to bridge the realms of necessity and spontaneity in the Critique of Judgement (1790), by suggesting that nature itself could be seen in more than formal terms: it also produces self-determining organisms and gives rise to disinterested aesthetic pleasure in the subject that contemplates its forms. The essential problems remained, however, that (1) Kant gave no account of the genesis of the subject that transcends its status as a piece of determined nature, and (2) such an account would have to be able to bridge the divide between nature and freedom. 