Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little book _God_ (1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture of Spinozism, one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand--but it was also an audacious--vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly called itself _amor erga rem infinitam et aeternam._ 'Spinoza,' says Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms like _substance_, _mode, cause_, are inadequate to interpret the intensity of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel[2].
It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins his first characteristic work,--the _Ideas towards a philosophy of Nature._ In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which all separate existence, body or mind, is only a _modus_, it is taken by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being. Every monad--and the human soul is the typical monad--is at once finite and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But--whether as underlying substance, or as unity of reality--both hold the cardinal doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity and unification--the identity--of what outside it appears as two sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise, therefore--or to see things in the absolute--is (not as Hegel's malicious joke puts it[3], to look at them 'in the night when all cows are dark,'--but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from the identity of the _Spirit_ within us with the _Nature_ without us.