  In another way as well the distinction helped Jacobi — or so he thought it did. From the beginning Jacobi had been faced by the difficulty that, in order to oppose philosophical reflection and the nihilism that it brought in train, he had had to attack ‘reason’ and to summon ‘faith’ in its stead. He had thereby made himself vulnerable to the charge of ‘irrationalism’ and ‘blind fideism’, a charge that he always strenuously rejected. So far as Jacobi was concerned, the true irrationalists were the philosophers. With the newly adopted distinction, Jacobi could now specifically direct to the ‘understanding’, or more accurately, to a ‘reason bound to the understanding’, the kind of criticism earlier directed quite generally to ‘reason’. He could then summon ‘reason’, with the new meaning attributed to it, to do the job previously performed by ‘faith’. In this way, he could more easily dodge the charge of ‘irrationalism’ or ‘fideism’, for it was for the sake of ‘reason’ — that is, ‘true reason’ — that he could now claim he was waging his campaign against the philosophers. The problem, of course, was that Jacobi never quite clarified this new meaning of ‘reason’. He was apparently using the concept in the same way as he had previously used ‘faith’, namely, as denoting an intuitive faculty akin to feeling but at the same time sporting the clarity of a concept. And this was a combination of notes just as obscure when it went under the name of ‘faith’ as it did when called ‘reason’. Whether the new distinction, and the new language that it made possible, in fact ever clarified Jacobi’s position is a question, therefore, open to debate.