Note 173 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Though Lessing at many points oppugned the positions of the Fragments, he was led into a fiery controversy over them, in which he was unworthily attacked by, among others, Semler, from whom he had looked for support; and the series was finally stopped by authority. There can now be no doubt that Lessing at heart agreed with Reimarus on most points of negative criticism,173 but reached a different emotional estimate and attitude. All the greater is the merit of his battle for freedom of thought. Thereafter, as a final check to his opponents, he produced his famous drama Nathan the Wise, which embodies Boccaccio’s story of The Three Rings, and has ever since served as a popular lesson of tolerance in Germany.174 In the end, he seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pantheist;175 but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive set of opinions,176 preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence, the state of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it.177