  One can understand, therefore, why Jacobi’s attitude towards Spinoza could have been a source of confusion for Mendelssohn and later critics as well — to the point that Jacobi himself was often taken to be a Spinozist. On the one hand, Jacobi pointed to Spinoza as an object lesson of all that is wrong with philosophical reason. On the other hand, he was praising him for being the most consistent of all philosophers (Jacobi, 1785: 27–29), and even defended him against those — Mendelssohn included — who, as he thought, detracted from his philosophy by their misguided attempts at ‘saving’ it from the consequences of its unmitigated rationalism. And there was another reason as well for Jacobi’s otherwise puzzling predilection for Spinoza — the Benedictus, as he once calls him, the ‘Blessed One’.  (Jacobi, 1799: 41) Spinoza knew that truth is its own criterion; that ultimately, therefore, it is not amenable to discursive reason but must be apprehended immediately on its own, intuitively. This was also Jacobi’s position. His objection against the rationalism of the philosophers boiled down to precisely this — that it was the product of a reason that had lost touch with its intuitive sources, and was therefore given to mistaking its own productions for the real thing. On this score, Jacobi thought that he had found a strange ally in the most rationalist of all philosophers.