  The first volume of Jacobi’s collected works was published in 1812; the second, in 1815. This last is especially important because it contains, added to the text of the David Hume, a long new Preface intended by Jacobi, as the title indicates, also as Introduction to his life long philosophical production (‘Preface and also Introduction to the Author’s Philosophical Collected Works’, Jacobi, 1812–25, vol. 2). In the piece, Jacobi tried to sum up his intellectual odyssey by articulating the interest that had motivated it from beginning to end, and thereby also to bring some systematic unity to what might otherwise have appeared a scattered philosophical production. Jacobi was obviously sensitive to the charge of irrationalism that had repeatedly been brought against him over the years, and anxious to disarm it. He appealed to the distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’ that he had adopted from around 1800 to argue, as he had already done in Of Divine Things, that the kind of knowledge he had earlier presented under the rubric of ‘faith’ should be understood rather as a product of ‘reason’ — a ‘reason’ properly understood, of course, as an intuitive faculty for the immediate apprehension of such eternal verities as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (Jacobi, 1812–1825, vol. 2, 1815: 59–63 and passim). He accordingly edited the 1787 text of the David Hume, attributing what he thought was the inconclusiveness of the dialogue to his yet unclarified concept of ‘reason’ at the time of the first edition. He added long footnotes to it, and even modified some crucial passages of the text itself — a circumstance, incidentally, for the most part ignored by later commentators — in an obvious effort to dispel the naturalism otherwise clearly implied in the original text.[13] While thus distancing himself from any possible evidence of naturalism, Jacobi however also tried to deflect the accusation, sometimes brought against him even by  friends,[14]  that he was against science. He tried to compensate for his past repeatedly made remark that science is but a game of abstractions (Jacobi, 1799: 22–27) by reasserting now, as he had already done in Of Divine Things, that, without the understanding’s power to synthesize in the medium of abstract representations the content of sensations, reason, just like the senses, would have no form and hence no cognition of itself (Jacobi, 1812–25: vol. 2, 58, 110). Jacobi also stressed that, however necessary the functions of the understanding, the latter is none the less still naturally prone to naturalism and to the atheism consequent upon it.