 Yet, while some of these criticisms of Spinoza may be compelling, they do not, Mendelssohn recognizes, carry the day for a refined Spinozist or pantheist. Spinoza’s inability to explain how movement and values derive from the attributes of the one, infinite substance does not, by itself, establish the theist explanation in Mendelssohn’s view. Accordingly, in Morning Hours he casts Lessing as the spokesperson for a refined pantheism — a move that figures prominently in this contribution to the Pantheismusstreit. Lessing is portrayed as someone who, while agreeing with Mendelssohn’s theist position, has a knack for giving every reasonable argument its full due. In this context Lessing presents a pantheism that characterizes the one and only substance, not only as a source of motion and desire, but also as capable of representing every possibility to itself and approving that possibility that constitutes “the best and most perfect series of things” (Morning Hours, p. 84/Gesammelte Schriften 3/2, p. 115). In other words, refined pantheism includes every aspect of the entire metaphysical system of theism but casts it solely as the object of divine intellect. As a result, a refined Spinozist might wonder how different the positions are since the theist purports to explain these seemingly recalcitrant phenomena merely by appealing to the divine will. A refined pantheist might accept the difference between the world (thought) and God (thinker) at a certain level, but insist that, in the end, the difference is on a merely abstract level since thinking and thought can only be distinguished as long as one is not actually thinking. After all, “who is to tell us that we ourselves and the world surrounding us have something more to them than the thoughts of God and modifications of his original power?” (Morning Hours, p. 84 (translation slightly altered)/Gesammelte Schriften, 3/2, p. 116). To pretend to show that there is something that can be predicated of things outside God that cannot be predicated of the divine thoughts of those things is to deny divine omniscience.