  According to Jacobi’s report of his conversation with Lessing, after a disquisition on his part regarding the devastating effects of a thought based on the demands of reason alone, and upon Lessing’s apparent declaration of sympathy for Spinoza, Jacobi had urged upon the latter to perform a salto mortale (Jacobi, 1785: 17), i.e., a kind of jump, heels over head, that would redress his position.  Enlightened philosopher that he was, Lessing had been walking on his head. The jump — which Lessing humorously declined to execute citing old age as excuse (Jacobi: 1785, 33–34) — would have brought him to his feet, back on the solid soil of common sense. Jacobi’s obvious agenda, in other words, both at the time of this meeting with Lessing and later, in the exchange of views with Mendelssohn, was to attack the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Also implied, however, was a criticism of Goethe. The latter had spearheaded the Sturm und Drang reaction against the same rationalism that Jacobi was now condemning. Jacobi’s veiled message was that the adepts of this new cultural phenomenon had failed to escape the rationalism of the philosophers, since the rebellious new humanism they advocated made sense only on the presupposition that the philosophers’ conception of reality was the right one. It is the desire to convey this message that alone explains the otherwise puzzling presence in Jacobi’s volume of the two poems by Goethe. To Jacobi’s contemporaries, who lacked the background knowledge of Jacobi’s special relationship to Goethe, and were even unaware of Goethe’s authorship of the second poem, their inclusion in the volume remained a mystery to the end.