  As it shows from the development of the friendship between the two main characters, Jacobi was actually harking back to the notion of reason he had adumbrated even as early as the first edition of the Spinoza Letters. Rationality is constituted in the relationship between an ‘I’ and a ‘Thou’, a relationship that respects the conditions of both its terms. Within the context of the Woldemar, this conclusion also brings resolution to a question discussed in a dialogue (the Waldgespräch) introduced in the first part of the narration — the question, namely, of the extent to which virtue depends on either nature or art. The answer is that it depends on both, provided that each is tested by the limits of actual human relations. At the conclusion of the novel, just as in the earlier dialogue, it is also clearly implied that the mutual respect that such relations demand from the individuals entering into them is possible only on the assumption of a ‘Thou’ greater than any human ‘I’ — a ‘Thou’ whose transcendent pull forces the human ‘I’ outside its otherwise purely natural limitations.[7] Jacobi’s last word, in his novels just as much as in his philosophical productions, always belongs to God.