 Interest in Bruno’s philosophy remained, nevertheless, sporadic. Copies of his works were hard to come by and, for the most part, the ideas in them remained curiosities, outlined in encyclopedias and histories of philosophy, such as those of Pierre Bayle and J. J. Brucker, with cautionary remarks about his extravagant, wayward, genius. More than any other philosopher, Bruno proved “that often the greater the power of intellect, the less judgement there is” (Brucker 1776–77: IV.2, 30). “Gold” there was to be discovered, but it lay concealed within the “dung” of his confused thinking (ibid., 31). What changed Bruno’s fortunes decisively was the advent of “Spinozism”. The similarities between Bruno’s and Spinoza’s substance monism had long been noticed. Bayle, no admirer of Spinoza, pointed them out, as did Mathurin Veyssière de Lacroze by way of denigrating Bruno as an “atheist” (Veyssière de Lacroz 1711, 284–325). Brucker conceded that there were some resemblances but concluded that Bruno did not merit the charge of “Spinozism” (ibid., 52), arguing that, for Bruno, the universe emanated from, rather than was identical with, God (see  Section 5). Then, spectacularly, in the second half the eighteenth century Bruno passed from being a heinous atheist to, in Herder’s estimation, someone comparable to, indeed “undoubtedly still more divine” than St John (McFarland 1969, 77). The key moment was the publication in 1785 of F. H. Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, in which Jacobi, without Mendelssohn’s consent, published an exchange of letters between them concerning Lessing’s alleged “Spinozism” and Spinoza’s philosophy more generally. Jacobi, an opponent of Enlightenment rationalism, praised Spinoza’s philosophy, in the “purified” form proposed by some exponents, as an exemplary manifestation of what pure reason, left to its own devices, could achieve. Equally, however, it manifested the limitations of reason, more specifically rational theism. It led essentially to materialism, fatalism and atheism. In 1789, Jacobi issued an expanded edition of his work, which included, in a new preface, a brief discussion of Bruno and his monism and, in an appendix, a German paraphrase of On the Cause, the Principle and the One together with an extended quotation from the second dialogue in the original Italian. His purpose in combining Spinoza and Bruno was to provide “a summa of the philosophy of the ἓν καὶ πάν”, a reference to Lessing’s “pantheist” theology as well as an allusion to Heraclitus’s monism. “It was difficult to give a purer or better explained summary of pantheism” than that provided by this “dark man”, Giordano Bruno (Jacobi 1789, IX, XI).