RENÉ GÉRARD NOTES THAT, particularly from 1798 on, with his concept of the Weltseele (World-Soul, or the soul of nature), Schelling was convinced that “modern philosophy was in the process of rejoining ‘primitive’ philosophy.” The system that Schelling was developing in these few years following the composition of his friend Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht iterates Novalis's theme of the arrival of a new universal religion destined to restore the knowledge of forgotten mysteries and the message of mystical Christianity. Schelling believed that the European skeptical and idealist systems could be brought together in a way that was consistent with Kantian autonomy; in fact he made doing so the goal of his earliest philosophical investigations as is evidenced by the Naturphilosophie he put forth in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797) and System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), both written by the age of twenty-five. For Schelling at this early stage of his development, Hindu philosophy figured as a system of recently rediscovered ancient wisdom that might unlock the problems that beset contemporary European philosophy.