critical recognition of the secure but hybrid nature of empirical knowledge – its content derived from sensation, its form secured by empty concepts furnished by reason. Schelling appreciated well enough Kant's conceptual precision; he chafed, though, at Kant's legislation of the limits of philosophy's competence: a metaphysics of experience, a formalistic morality, strictures placed on the artist's and scientist's imagination, and the reduction of religion to morality without remainder – which meant, in Germany, accommodation with the political status quo. In his willingness to return to pre-critical sources of inspiration such as Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz, his incorporation of religious themes voiced by heterodox figures such Giordano Bruno, Joachim di Fiore, and Jakob Böhme, and his seemingly quixotic fight against Newtonian optics and the methods of hypothesis-formation and experimental test practiced by the working scientists of his day, Schelling seemed in his own day to court ridicule." /> Religion beyond the limits of criticism - Vater Michael | sdvig press