GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF CRITICAL SPIRIT. 119 



the latter on the subject of Spinoza, drew attention to 

 the works of that remarkable man, and introduced him 

 to the notice of such original minds as Herder, Goethe, 

 Fichte, and Schelling. In fact, it may be said that 

 Spinoza was to the poetical mind of the great German 

 classics a much more congenial thinker than Kant. 

 The philosophy of Spinoza from that moment became 

 and has remained one of the great agencies, not to say 

 sources, of inspiration in the development of the ideal- 

 istic systems which for fully thirty years pushed the 

 critical philosophy of Kant into the background. 



It has been truly said that Kant and Spinoza form 25. 



Kant and 



the two poles around which the deeper thought of Ger- spinozathe 



^ i o poles of 



many at that time revolved.^ This twofold attraction ^if™'^", 

 started about the same time, for Kant's ' First Critique ' 

 appeared in the year 1781 and Jacobi's ' Letters on the 

 Doctrine of Spinoza' appeared four years after, in 1785. 

 But the very different ways in which Kantism and 

 Spinozism made their appearance — the former in a 

 strictly philosophical treatise, the latter in a literary 

 discussion ^ — correspond to the abstract logical character 



^ "A momentous coincidence i contrast that exists between them, 

 willed it that just at the time j Kant and Spinoza became the two 



when the ' Critique ' of the all- 

 destroying man of Konigsberg be- 

 gan to make headway, the most 

 firmly jointed and eifective of all 

 metaphysical systems, the type it- 

 self of dogmatism, became known 

 in Germany : namely, Spinozism. 

 Through the controversy be- 

 tween Jacubi and Mendelssohn, 

 ■which referred to Lessing's posi- 

 tion with regard to Spinoza, the 

 doctrine of the latter had become 

 the subject of the most lively in- 

 teiest, and this through the deejj 



poles around which the thought of 

 the following generation revolved " 

 (Windelband, ' Geschichte der 

 Philosophie,' 4th ed., p. 475). 



^ It appears that Goethe during 

 his Strassburg period became ac- 

 quainted through Hamann and 

 Herder first with the writings of 

 Giordano Bruno, and was led from 

 them to occupy himself with 

 Spinoza, one side of whose doc- 

 trine, the mystical and pantheistic, 

 attracted him. He could not agree 

 with Bayle, who speaks of the 



