 Wolfram Hogrebe has claimed that the WA philosophy is an ontological theory of predication. Being, as initially One and enclosed within itself, is not manifest, and has no reason to be manifest. Hogrebe terms this ‘pronominal being’. The same being must also, given that there is now a manifest world, be ‘predicative being’, which “flows out, spreads, gives itself” (SW I/8, p. 210–211). The contradiction between the two kinds of being is only apparent. Schelling maintains, in line with the identity philosophy, that the “properly understood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannot be as the same something and also the opposite thereof, but this does not prevent the same, which is A, being able, as an other, to be not A” (SW I/8, p. 213–4). One aspect of being, the dark force, which he sometimes terms ‘gravity’, is contractive, the other expansive, which he terms ‘light’. Dynamic processes are the result of the interchange between these ultimately identical forces. If they were wholly separate there would either be no manifest universe, because contraction would dominate, or the universe would dissipate at infinite speed because expansion would dominate. The result would be the same: there would not be a world. If something is to be as something it must both be, in the positive sense in which everything else is, which makes it indeterminately positive, pronominal, and it must have a relationship to what it is not, in order to be determinate, which brings it into the realm of predication by taking it beyond itself. In the WA the One comes into contradiction with itself and the two forces constantly vie with each other. Differences must, however, be grounded in unity, as otherwise they could not be manifest at all as differences. The ground is now increasingly regarded as the source of the transitory nature of everything particular, and less and less as the source of tranquil insight into how we can be reconciled to finite existence. The mood of the WA is summed up in Schelling’s reference to the “veil of melancholy which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life” (SW I/7, p. 399). The source of this melancholy is that everything finite must ‘go to ground’ and that we are aware of this. Awareness thus both makes sense of things and yet is also what is underpinned by a negativity it must constantly seek to come to terms with.