 Herder shares with Spinoza the basic thesis of monism, and like Spinoza equates the single, all-encompassing principle in question with God (which of course already challenges Jacobi’s charge of atheism). But whereas Spinoza had characterized this single, all-encompassing principle as substance, Herder instead characterizes it as force, or primal force. This fundamental modification involves several further ones that Herder also finds attractive, including the following: (1) Whereas Spinoza had tended to conceive the principle in question as an inactive thing, Herder’s revision rather turns it into an activity. (2) Spinoza’s theory had attributed thought to the principle in question, but had rejected conceptions that it had intentions or was a mind. By contrast, Herder claims that it does have intentions. And since his general philosophy of mind identifies the mind with force, his identification of the principle in question with force also carries an implication that it is a mind (he does not yet quite say this in God: Some Conversations, but a few years later in On the Spirit of Christianity of 1798 he explicitly describes God as a Geist, a mind). In these ways, Herder in effect re-mentalizes Spinoza’s God (thereby further undermining Jacobi’s charge of atheism). (3) Whereas Spinoza had conceived nature mechanistically, in keeping with his Cartesian intellectual heritage (and had thereby invited Jacobi’s charge of fatalism), Herder (though officially still agnostic about what force is) rather tends to conceive the forces at work in nature as living, or organic (a conception of them that he mainly owes to Leibniz). (4) Herder believes that Spinoza’s original theory contained an objectionable residue of dualism (again inherited from Descartes) in its conception of the relation between God’s two known attributes, thought and extension (and similarly, in its conception of the relation between finite minds and bodies). By contrast, Herder’s own conception of God as a force (and of finite minds as likewise forces) is designed to overcome this alleged residual dualism. For forces are of their very nature expressed in the behavior of extended bodies. (5) Herder also sketches a more detailed account of nature as a system of living forces based in the primal force, God—an account that in particular ascribes an important role in this system to the sort of opposition between forces that is exemplified by the magnet with its two opposite poles, and that characterizes the system as a self-development toward higher and higher forms of articulation.