There is no one universal canonical Naturphilosophie. Rather, like nature itself, Schelling’s philosophy of naturePhilosophynatural/of nature, from its beginnings, was in a ferment, many-faceted and hard to definitively characterize. When Schelling says “My object, rather, is first to allow naturalScience(s) ()natural science itself to arise philosophically, and my philosophy is itself nothing else than natural sciencePhilosophyof (natural) science,” he is both describing its development and the role that it played and would play in his thought. The philosophy of naturePhilosophynatural/of nature reflects sustained engagement with ideas evident in Schelling’s unpublished earliest notebooks and studies; it came to define his difference from Fichte and ultimately was the largest factor in their disagreements and final falling-out; and it retains lasting value as a naturalizedEpistemologynaturalized epistemology, an account of nature which does not just include consciousness, but also makes it possible. Finally, it must be recognized as the last grand systematic effort to transform and reunite the human being and natureUnityof the human being and nature, without reducing either to a form or necessary stage on the way to the other. Schelling’s earliest writing on topics in Naturphilosophie focused on the idea of life, and it is the development of this idea that will provide the path to a vision of being in the middle and later works as grounded in the deep structure of life, leading to the discussion of God’s lifeLifeGod’s in the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected TherewithSchelling, F.W.S. and the genesis of history and being itselfBeing ( or )itself in The Ages of the WorldSchelling, F.W.S..