 The sensationalist character of the controversy should not obscure the substance and importance of Mendelssohn’s debate with Jacobi. Jacobi had contended that Spinozism is the only consistent position for a metaphysics based upon reason alone and that the only solution to this metaphysics so detrimental to religion and morality is a leap of faith, that salto mortale that poor Lessing famously refused to make. Mendelssohn counters Jacobi’s first contention by attempting to demonstrate the metaphysical inconsistency of Spinozism. He takes aim at Jacobi’s second contention by demonstrating how the “purified Spinozism” or “refined pantheism” embraced by Lessing is, in the end, only nominally different from theism and thus a threat neither to religion nor to morality.