83 No, not at all, my friend Lessing would exclaim if he had been present at our last lecture, You are still quite far from the goal and proclaim victory before you have overturned [your foe]. Even if all the observations that you brought up against Spinoza were correct, in the end you would still have refuted merely Spinoza alone, not Spinozism. You would have shown that the system of this philosopher, no less than every other one set forth by a mortal, has its deficiencies and gaps, that he was lacking in the foundation that he gave the edifice containing his doctrine and omit- ted things without which this edifice cannot stand. But does the complete overthrow of everything maintained by Spinoza follow already from this? How does it, par- ticularly if a later adherent of this great man sought to fill in the gaps and make up for the deficiencies? Or, suppose we thoroughly renounced the system and con- fessed that things do not allow themselves to be combined into a series of geometric inferences. Would it be necessary for Spinozism or pantheism, on account of this, to be completely given up? Regardless of this, could the proposition not be true: Everything is one and one is everything? You have refuted the system of our opponent: has your system been proven in the process? Let us look more closely, he would continue, at how far we have come. You say: ‘Spinoza cannot, on the basis of his basic principles, explain the origin of motion.’ Good! What anti-spinozist or theist then knows how to give a better account of this? They appeal to the will of God who is supposed to have communicated movement to matter. Spinoza also has all motion springing from something similar that he calls ‘will,’ although I do not know how to make his assertion on this point fully clear to myself. Perhaps even the pantheist finds addi- tional assistance of this kind to explain the origin of motion [115] and, if he does not find it, this origin may remain thoroughly unexplained. In the end the appeal to the divine will is not far from a confession of one’s ignorance and the advan- tage that the theist may have in this regard is by far not important enough to give his system the decisive upperhand. The pantheist can concede the difference between truth and goodness, knowledge and approval, along with all the conse- quences that can rightly be drawn from these distinctions. He can also locate the source of the formal as well as the material in the sole, divine substance. You see how much I make place for in his name without giving up the system on that account. Chapter 14 Continued dispute with the pantheists. – Approximation. – Point of unison with them. – Innocuousness of the purified patheism. – Compatibility with religion and ethics insofar as they are practical. [114] M. Mendelssohn, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence, Studies in German Idealism 12, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0418-3_14, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011