The world shared by Goethe and Schiller, the Jena Romantics, and the post-Kantian idealists was defined by the near-simultaneous appearance of Kant’s idealism and Spinoza’s naturalism, almost a double sun in the intellectual heavens. Schelling’s temperament—with his taste for grand theory, wide learning, physics, physiology, and situational ethics—hewed closer to Spinoza’s doctrine than to Kant’s, though his vision of philosophical system, methodology, and philosophical vocabulary was indebted to Kant. While one can get a basic view of Fichte by looking at what he took from Kant and Reinhold, or of Hegel by his appropriation and critique of Fichte, it is difficult to get a single story of Schelling’s path by looking to its Kantian elements. But from his first philosophical essays to his last public address in 1850, Schelling is ever at work criticizing and reshaping Spinoza’s naturalism. If one wants a phrase that distills Schelling’s lifetime of thinking into a single goal, it would be overcoming Spinoza: infusing his deduction of God, world, and the human order in a mechanistic key with a sense of life, spirit, freedom, and contingency. Schelling identified four main problems. The first correction needed was to overcome Spinoza’s lifeless and reifying account of nature by bringing nature to life, unifying organic and inorganic nature in a single theory. A second correction was needed concerning the description of Spinoza’s system as pantheism: if God/nature is both ordering and ordered, and the relation between substance and mode cannot be clarified from the latter, the immanence of divine action in modal entities obliterates the latter’s independence. Schelling finds a third problem in Spinoza’s identification of human freedom with acting from divine necessity. Schelling’s final issue with Spinoza is his thorough-going conceptualism, his inability to separate modal predicates from the factual assertion of existence.