  In his Open Letter, Jacobi famously declared Fichte as the true disciple of Kant — the one who had brought the premises of Transcendental Idealism to their logical conclusions. He also revised his prior estimate of Spinoza. He had always portrayed the latter as the most consistent of all philosophers. He now recognized that the attribute belonged in truth to Fichte. He was in fact the philosopher par excellance — the Messias of Reason, as Jacobi now loudly proclaims him (Jacobi, 1799: 2). For Fichte had extended the reach of philosophical abstraction, with which Spinoza had gone only so far as to exclude the possibility of subjectivity, to retrieve this subjectivity itself within its compass, as if it could be excogitated a priori out of pure thought. Fichte’s idealism was a case of inverted Spinozism, of spiritual materialism (Jacobi, 1799: 2–5). For Spinoza’s substance, which explains all things by explaining none of them in particular, hence relegates the determination of individuals to the endless mechanism of external causes, was now being reintroduced as the product of pure reflection, as its first objectification. It was as if reflection dissolved all things in the ether of pure thought, out of sheer freedom, and then reassembled them again — but now as a game, according to self-concocted rules (Jacobi, 1799: 24–27).