  The following years were marked by the visits to Pempelfort of Hamann, Stolberg, Herder, and Goethe (November 1792). Soon, however, political events were to overtake philosophical discourse. The beheading in Paris of Louis XVI (1793) shocked German public opinion, and occasioned Jacobi’s lament in ‘Accidental Outpourings of a Lonely Thinker’ (Jacobi, 1795). In 1794, as the French revolutionary armies crossed the Rhine and began bombarding Düsseldorf, Jacobi abandoned Pempelfort and undertook a long peregrination in the North, the guest of many friends in whose company he found comfort (Prantl, 1881: 582). He settled for a time in Eutin. At this time he began the composition of ‘Of Divine Things’, a manuscript that he completed and published only later.  In 1799 he became involved in the so called ‘Atheism dispute’. This was a controversy surrounding the alleged atheism of Fichte which Jacobi himself had not initiated but in which he none the less played a leading role. At the request of Lavater, he wrote an open letter to Fichte (Jacobi, 1799) in which he restated all his objections to philosophy in general and the new idealism in particular, and reaffirmed his commitment to the primacy of faith. He also singled out Fichte as one who had realized all his misgivings about philosophy, since he had succeeded in restating Spinozism even from the standpoint of subjectivity. In a supplement (Supplement II) to the letter, Jacobi included a long comment on the nature of reason that he reprinted in the second volume of his collected works (1815)as an independent essay under the title of ‘On the Inseparability of the Concept of Freedom and Providence from the Concept of Reason’ (Jacobi, 1812–1825). In 1802, he published ‘On the Undertaking of Critique to Reduce Reason to Understanding’ (Jacobi, 1802 (1)) — this latter directed particularly at Kant.