  At any rate, whether Jacobi’s agenda was directed at the Enlightenment or the Sturm und Drang, the presence of Spinoza both in his conversation with Lessing and the later controversy with Mendelssohn was clear. Quite apart from the fact that he had been the central object of discussion in Jacobi’s first encounter with Goethe — another circumstance that Jacobi’s contemporaries could not know — Spinoza was now being portrayed by Jacobi as the one philosopher who had had the courage to press the logicism of the philosophers to its ultimate limit, and to draw from it its inevitable conclusions. Spinoza had subsumed all reality under the one highest abstraction of ‘substance’, with the net result that any real distinction between one presumed individual thing and any other, and between all things and God, was being denied. True generation, or anything connected with temporality, equally disappeared, except as mere illusionary phenomena. This was as nihilistic a conclusion as, in Jacobi’s opinion, one could possible draw. In his eyes, therefore, Spinoza stood as the philosopher par excellence (an attribute, however, which he later conferred on Fichte). According to the formula that he drew, philosophy equals Spinozism, and Spinozism in turn equals atheism — this last part of the equation being based on the assumption that, since Spinoza’s God, viz. Substance, lacked the attributes of a person, it could not satisfy the requirements of true religiosity.