  The other major work of Jacobi in this last period, Of Divine Things and Their Revelation, was published in 1811. Jacobi had actually begun writing the piece ten years earlier, as the review of a recently published volume by a pietist writer, but had later picked it up again and completed in a totally different cast as a critique of Schelling’s ‘System of Identity’ and of the new Philosophy of Nature connected with it. Evidence of its earlier purpose is still visible in the final text, beginning as it does with the discussion of a moral issue, namely, whether morality is to be based on virtue alone, or on natural happiness, or a combination of both. But then the text suddenly shifts to a long discussion of Kant’s critical philosophy, the burden of which is however to demonstrate that Schelling’s recent idealistic productions were but the logical consequences of precisely that philosophy. The treatment of Kant in this context is a strangely qualified one. On the one hand, Jacobi praises him highly, showing him all the respect due to someone who had become an icon of German philosophical culture. He praises him because he had unequivocally recognized that a true God (presumably, such as morality demands) must be a person; also because he acknowledged that we have an immediate belief in God, freedom, and immortality, and ‘belief’ for Jacobi of course meant ‘knowledge’; finally, because, just like Jacobi himself, he had tried to respect and harmonize the interests of reason, which are directed to God, and those of the understanding, which are directed to the senses (Jacobi, 1812–25: vol.  3, 341–44; 351–52). Such praises, however, turn out to be hollow — even a masked form of condemnation. For Jacobi’s main thesis throughout the otherwise rambling work is that Kant, while upholding personalistic values, had in fact subverted them conceptually, the net product being Fichte’s system of ideal materialism and now the openly naturalistic system of Schelling.