Pantheism controversy

What became a wider cultural debate in German society started as a personal disagreement between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn over their understanding of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Spinozist beliefs.

1789) expressed sharply and clearly his strenuous objection to a dogmatic system in philosophy[citation needed], and drew upon him the vigorous enmity of the Berlin group, led by Moses Mendelssohn.

Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance.

[2] Jacobi's next important work, David Hume Über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (1787), was an attempt to show not only that the term Glaube had been used by the most eminent writers to denote what he had employed it for in the Letters on Spinoza, but that the nature of the cognition of facts, as opposed to the construction of inferences, could not be otherwise expressed.

In this writing, and especially in the appendix, Jacobi came into contact with Kant's critical philosophy, and subjected the Kantian view of knowledge to searching examination.