HUME TO HEGEL Like the Romantics, Lessing admired Spinoza He regarded the world as a single uniWed system whose components were identical with ideas in the mind of God He was willing to accept that determinism was true and that freedom was an illusion; on the other hand, he was willing to admit contingency in the world, with the consequence that some among God’s ideas were contingent also He praised Spinoza for realizing that liberation from anxiety is only to be achieved by accepting the inevitability of destiny ‘I thank my God’, he said, ‘that I am under necessity, that the best must be.’ Lessing’s most important philosophical work was The Education of the Human Race (1780) The human race, like the human individual, passes through diVerent stages, to which diVerent kinds of instruction are appropriate The upbringing of a child is a matter of physical rewards and punishment: the childhood of the human race was the era of the Old Testament In our youth, educators oVer us more spiritual rewards for good conduct; eternal rewards and punishments for an immortal soul This corresponds to the period of history dominated by the Christian religion However, as Lessing endeavoured to show in a number of critical studies of the New Testament, the evidence for the divine origin of Christianity is uncompelling Even the strongest historical evidence about contingent facts, Lessing went on to argue, cannot justify any conclusion to necessary truths about matters of divinity The Christian religion, therefore, can be no more than a stage in the education of the human race, and its dogmas can have no more than symbolic value Human nature, come of age, must extract from Christianity a belief in the universal brotherhood of man, and must pursue moral values for their own sake, not for the sake of any reward here or hereafter (although Lessing toys with the idea of a transmigration of souls into a new incarnation after death) Like the leaders of the French Enlightenment, Lessing was a passionate advocate of religious toleration; he gave fullest expression to this advocacy in his drama Nathan the Wise (1779) One reason for toleration that Lessing oVers is that the worth of a person does not depend on whether his beliefs are true, but on how much trouble he has taken to attain the truth This novel argument was presented in a vivid paragraph often quoted since: If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving after truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, Choose, 99