principles.' _There_, on the other hand, is the champion of reason, who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of antinomianism and a quietism of immorality[6]': 'To humanity,' he says, 'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some system of principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.' In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at Wolfenbüttel[7]. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's work _Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza_ (it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in nature: he was the leader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and utilitarianism.