Schelling did not understand Fichte, as Fichte himself always maintained. He thinks Fichte's first principle is simply a reflection on the empirical self - this is understandable if you only read Part 1 of the Foundation, it's impossible if you've thought through the whole. So, for Schelling, with Fichte nature and consciousness are still split in two - Fichte's shown how nature can follow from consciousness, but there needs to be another synthesis in which consciousness follows from nature, and then an even higher identity that synthesizes both. For Schelling, Fichtean idealism is hopelessly one-sided. This is also how Hegel reads Fichte, i.e. through Schelling's eyes, even in relatively late works like his lectures on the history of philosophy. So Schelling starts out with two opposites, nature and consciousness, and then tries to "smoosh" them together. But this is impossible, because he has begun with their opposition. This is why his identity principle is not really an identity at all, as anyone can see for themselves if they care to read his Presentation of My System, and he cannot explain why this identity-principle emanates into multiplicity. It also leads to a lot of schizo speculation about the laws of nature following from a priori principles, "the reduction of form to essence" and so on - as Fichte points out in Characteristics of the Present Age, Schelling never made an original discovery in natural science this way. He just took findings of real scientists and came up with schizo explanations for them. Fichte, on the other hand, begins with unity and then explains the appearance of duality from this unity. Fichte also leaves natural science to actual scientists.

Let's look at a few passages from Schelling's 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism together. I want to show that Schelling didn't understand Fichte because Schelling's retarded misreading has become almost canonical insofar as it is parrotted by Hegel. Exploding this misinterpretation is essential for revivifying the study of Fichte, which will lead to a new epoch of Reason, Socialism with Autistic Characteristics.