Note 140 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

17. Alongside of these propagators of popular rationalism stood a group of companion deists usually considered together—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). The last-named, a Jew, “lived entirely in the sphere of deism and of natural religion,”140 and sought, like the deists in general, to give religion an ethical structure; but he was popular chiefly as a constructive theist and a defender of the doctrine of immortality on non-Christian lines. His Phædon (1767), setting forth that view, had a great vogue.141 One of his more notable teachings was an earnest declaration against any connection between Church and State; but like Locke and Rousseau he so far sank below his own ideals as to agree in arguing for a State enforcement of a profession of belief in a God142—a negation of his own plea. With much contemporary popularity, he had no permanent influence; and he seems to have been completely broken-hearted over Jacobi’s disclosure of the final pantheism of Lessing, for whom he had a great affection.