  Throughout the pantheism controversy, Rehberg maintained his skeptical attitude toward all religious belief.  Such skepticism was unique, his original contribution to the controversy.  All his fellow disputants— Kant, Herder, Jacobi, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin—affirmed some kind of religion, whether theism or pantheism.  Although Rehberg agreed with Jacobi that all metaphysics ends in Spinozism, he did not take this as proof for pantheism, still less as reason for a salto mortale into theism.  Since he rejected all metaphysics as empty speculation, he did not think that reason obliges us to accept pantheism, let alone theism.  Metaphysics could never justify theism, Rehberg argued, because it at best establishes that there is a first cause of things, but never that this first cause is a personal being with understanding and  will.[22]  Although we can attribute understanding and will to God, we have to realize that such attributes are only anthropomorphisms that are true for us and never for  things-in-themselves.[23]  When his friend J.J. Engel later asked him “Do you want to reduce all religion down to poetry?”, Rehberg did not demur; his only qualification was that poetry sometimes has a moral  worth.[24] 