LESSING. 305 speak of a negative, use of them. His weakness * consists in the fact that, on the one hand, he contented himself with a rationalistic interpretation of the biblical narratives, instead of pushing on — as Semler did after him at Halle (1725- 91) — to a historical criticism of the sources, and, on the other, held fast to the alternative common to all the deists, "Either divine or human, either an actual event or a fabrication," without any suspicion of that great inter- mediate region of religious myth, of the involuntary and pregnant inventions of the popular fancy. The philosophico-religious standpoint of G. E. Lessing (1729-81), in whom the Illumination reached its best fruitage, was less one-sided. Apart from the important aesthetic impulses which flowed from the Laocoon (1766) and the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69), his philosophical significance rests on two ideas, which have had important consequences for the religious conceptions of the nineteenth century: the speculative interpretation of certain dogmas (the Trinity, etc.), and the application of the Leibnitzian idea of development to the history of the positive religions. By both of these he prepared the way for Hegel. In regard to his relation to his predecessors, Lessing sought to mediate between the pantheism of Spinoza and the individualism of Leibnitz; and in his comprehension of the latter showed himself far superior to the Wolfifians. He can be called a Spinozist only by those who, like Jacobi, have this title ready for everyone who expresses himself against a tran- scendent, personal God, and the unconditional freedom of the will. Moreover, in view of his critical and dialectical, rather than systematic, method of thinking, we must guard against laying too great stress on isolated statements by him.f Lessing conceives the Deity as the supreme, all-compre- hensive, living unity, which excludes neither a certain kind of plurality nor even a certain kind of change ; without life and
- Cf. O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. i. p. io2, p. lo6 seq.
A caution which Gideon Spicker {Lessings Weltanschauung, 1883) counsels
us not to forget, even in view of the oft cited avowal of determinism, " I thank God that I must, and that I must the best." Among the numerous treatises on Lessing we may note those by G. E. Schwarz (1854), and Zeller (in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift^ 1 870, incorporated in the second collection of Zeller's
