 Even so, the Pietists’ foremost philosophical concern was with preserving the genuine freedom of the human (and divine) will against Wolff’s Leibniz-inspired assaults (cf. Bianco 1989). According to Lange, Wolff’s endorsement of the principle of sufficient reason has the consequence of reducing the soul to an automaton and rendering the series of events that constitute the world a fatally determined concatenation. The result is a necessitarianism distinguishable from total Spinozism only because Wolff accepts a plurality of substances (Lange 1724: 72–3 [2019: 153]). Against this, Lange contends that the freedom (rather than mere spontaneity) of the will is directly evident through experience (particularly through our conscience) and constitutes the essence of the human being, that it is required for morality and religion, and that it serves to exempt human beings from the chain of natural necessitation. In spite of his unsympathetic reception in the history of philosophy, Lange succeeds in outlining a coherent antithesis to the Leibnizian-Wolffian conception of the soul and its place in nature, one that would prove influential for later Pietist critics (like Crusius) and that would also form an important part of the background to Kant’s own later discussion of freedom.