The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[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.]