  The dialogue that Jacobi published in 1787 carried the full title of David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, A Dialogue. It had originally been intended as three separate dialogues, as the structure of the final product still betrays. It clearly falls into three parts, with an autobiographical interlude connecting the first and second which is the source of much of our knowledge about Jacobi’s early philosophical education. Jacobi uses it as a vehicle for documenting how much, from the beginning, he had been temperamentally driven always to give priority to existence, as immediately apprehended, over any conceptual representation of it, and also for putting on record that, when still a young man, he had found this irresistible tendency of his best satisfied in Kant’s two early essays, one on evidence in metaphysics and the other on the proof of God’s existence (Jacobi, 1787: 67ff). These autobiographical remarks come on the heels of a defence, in the first part of the Dialogue, against the accusation of irrationalism brought against him chiefly because of his use of the term ‘faith’ (Glaube, in German) in the Spinoza Letters. Jacobi’s many polemical divagations apart, the main line of the defence is very simple. Hume also had used the term ‘belief’ (also translated in German as Glaube) for the kind of assent which is based on experience and is expressed in the form of judgement. Such an assent is immediate, a matter of feeling rather than ratiocination, and all the more unimpeachable precisely because reason alone would never induce it on its own. Now, Jacobi argues, in the Spinoza Letters he had used the term ‘faith’ (also Glaube in German) in the same sense, in order to claim that judgement of existence must be immediate. No process of ratiocination could produce the certainty that accompanies it. There was no ‘irrationalism’, therefore, either intended or implied. On the contrary, Jacobi had been forced to use the term, and to oppose it to reason, only because the philosophers had pre-empted the latter term, and had unduly restricted it to mean the kind of discursive conceptualization that abstracts from real things and is ultimately irrelevant to judgments of existence (Jacobi, 1787: 29ff).