And yet here lay the key to the whole new intellectual development in Germany. Behind Lessing's brilliant attack upon ecclesiastical dogma there had lain, unperceived by his contemporaries, the philosophy of Spinoza. Immediately after the great critic's death the literary world received a double surprise. The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi elicited the appalling fact that Lessing had lived and died a Spinozist, and also showed that even Jacobi himself was of the opinion that all philosophy logically carried out must inevitably lead to Spinozism and pantheism. He endeavoured to extricate himself from the difficulty by pointing out that there is another way of arriving at knowledge of the truth than by conclusive argument, namely, the way of direct intuitive perception. But from this time onwards pantheism was in the air, and from the moment that Goethe, enraptured by his first reading of Spinoza, declares himself a Spinozist (a faith from which he never wavered to the end of his long life), it reigns in German literature; and this spirit of the new age, with its rich dower of poetry and philosophic thought, weds that antique beauty which has been brought to life again; as Faust, in the most famous poetical work of the period, weds Helen of Troy, who symbolises ancient Greece. The great pagan renaissance which had been inaugurated in Italy by such men as Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, and in England by such men as Shakespeare and Bacon, now finds its way to Germany, and the new intellectual tendency is strengthened by the enthusiasm for pagan-Greek antiquity awakened by Winckelmann and Lessing. Schiller writes _Die Götter Griechenlands_, Goethe, _Die Diana der Epheser_ and _Die Braut von Corinth_. After the glory of Greece had departed, a mariner, voyaging along her coast by night, heard from the woods the cry: "Great Pan is dead!" But Pan was not dead; he had only fallen asleep. He awoke again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance; he was acknowledged and worshipped as a living god in the Germany of Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel. The new German spirit was even more pantheistic than the antique spirit. When the ancient Greek stood by some beautiful waterfall, like that of Tibur near Rome, he endowed what he saw with personality. His eye traced the contours of beautiful naked women, the nymphs of the place, in the falling waters of the cascade; the wreathing spray was their waving hair; he heard their merry splashing and laughter in the rush of the stream and the dashing of the foam against the rocks. In other words, impersonal nature became personal to the antique mind. The poet of old did not understand nature; his own personality stood in the way; he saw it reflected everywhere, saw _persons_ wherever he looked.