Note 209 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

The chief sample passages in his works are the poem Das Göttliche and the speech of Faust in reply to Gretchen in the garden scene. It was the surmised pantheism of Goethe’s poem Prometheus that, according to Jacobi, drew from Lessing his avowal of a pantheistic leaning. The poem has even an atheistic ring; but we have Goethe’s own account of the influence of Spinoza on him from his youth onwards (Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. xiv; Th. IV, B. xvi). See also his remarks on the “natural” religion of “conviction” or rational inference, and that of “faith” (Glaube) or revelationism, in B. iv (Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 134); also Kestner’s account of his opinions at twenty-three, in Düntzer’s Life, Eng. tr. i, 185; and again his letter to Jacobi, January 6, 1813, quoted by Düntzer, ii, 290. ↑