Spinoza and the individualism of Leibnitz; and in his comprehension of the latter showed himself far superior to the Wolffians.  He can be called a Spinozist only by those who, like Jacobi, have this title ready for everyone who expresses himself against a transcendent, personal God, and the unconditional freedom of the will.  Moreover, in view of his critical and dialectical, rather than systematic, method of thinking, we must guard against laying too great stress on isolated statements by him.[1]

[Footnote 1:  A caution which Gideon Spicker (Lessings Weltanschauung, 1883) counsels us not to forget, even in view of the oft cited avowal of determinism, “I thank God that I must, and that I must the best.”  Among the numerous treatises on Lessing we may note those by G.E.  Schwarz (1854), and Zeller (in Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, 1870, incorporated in the second collection of Zeller’s Vortraege und Abhandlungen, 1877); and on his theological position, that of K. Fischer on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, 1864, as well as J.H.  Witte’s Philosophie unserer Dichterheroen, vol. i. (Lessing and Herder), 1880. [Cf. in English, Sime, 2 vols., 1877, and Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. xiv. pp, 478-482.—­TR.]]

Lessing conceives the Deity as the supreme, all-comprehensive, living unity, which excludes neither a certain kind of plurality nor even a certain kind of change; without life and action, without the experience of changing states, the life of God would be miserably wearisome.  Things are not out of, but in him; nevertheless (as “contingent”) they are distinct from him.  The Trinity must be understood in the sense of immanent distinctions.  God has conceived himself, or his perfections, in a twofold manner:  he conceived them as united and himself as their sum, and he conceived them as single.  Now God’s thinking is creation, his ideas actualities.  By conceiving his perfections united he created his eternal image, the Son of God; the bond between God representing and God represented, between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit.  But when he conceived his perfections singly he created the world, in which these manifest themselves divided among a continuous series of particular beings.  Every individual is an isolated divine perfection; the things in the world are limited gods, all living, all with souls, and of a spiritual nature, though in different degrees.  Development is everywhere; at present the soul has five senses, but very probably it once had less than five, and in the future it will have more.  At first the actions of men were guided by obscure instinct; gradually the reason obtained influence over the will, and one day will govern it completely through its clear and distinct cognitions.  Thus freedom is attained in the course of history—­the rational and virtuous man consciously obeys the divine order of the world, while he who is unfree obeys unconsciously.