 One of these contributions (arguably important mainly for its influence) lies in his neo-Spinozism. Herder’s sympathetic engagement with Spinoza’s work goes back at least as far as 1769. But its main expression occurs in God: Some Conversations from 1787 (a second, substantially revised edition appeared in 1800). Herder published this work in the wake of Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785), in which Jacobi had revealed that the highly respected philosopher, critic, and dramatist Lessing—who was much admired by Herder in particular—had confessed to him shortly before his death that he had abandoned orthodox religious conceptions in favor of Spinozism. Jacobi had himself argued, sharply to the contrary, that Spinozism, and indeed all fundamental reliance on reason, implies atheism and fatalism, and should therefore be rejected in favor of a leap of faith to a conventional Christian theism. Jacobi’s work, along with a reply by Moses Mendelssohn that disputed the attribution of Spinozism to Lessing though not the perniciousness of such a position, caused a public furor. In God: Some Conversations Herder intervened. In this work he supports Lessing as Jacobi had characterized him by developing a version of “Spinozism” that modifies the original in some significant respects, largely with a view to defusing Jacobi’s objections.