[Born at Düsseldorf, 1743. Died at Munich, 1819. Aged 76.]
The son of a merchant whose business he followed in spite of his great
fondness for literature, until an official appointment in his native
city enabled him to devote his whole time to study. In 1777, he
published “Friendship and Love,” a philosophical poem, and in the same
year was invited to Munich, where he was made Privy Councillor. In 1781,
he had a sharp controversy with Mendelssohn, respecting the doctrines of
Spinosa. In 1804, he assisted in the formation of the Academy of
Sciences at Munich, of which institution he became President in 1807.
His work published in 1811, upon “Divine Things and Revelation,”
involved him in bitter discussion with Schelling. Jacobi was a
philosophical critic, rather than the founder of a distinct
philosophical system, and his polemical works did good service to
philosophy by weeding false theories from systems already in existence.
He was an honest, diligent, and penetrating inquirer after truth, and
carried a reverent mind and a sincerity of purpose into all his
investigations. He affirmed that all our knowledge of the divine world
comes by spiritual intuition, and that all demonstrative systems tend to
fatalism.
[By Tieck, 1809. In plaster. Modelled at Munich, and now in the Royal
Museum, Berlin.]