Moses Mendelssohn 
Morning Hours 
Lectures on God’s Existence

First Part.- Preliminary report.- Preliminary Knowledge of Truth, Semblance, and Error.- I.  What is truth?- II.  Cause – Effect – Ground – Force.- III.  Evidence – Of immediate Knowledge.  Rational Knowledge – Knowledge of Nature.- IV.  Truth and Illusion.- V.  Existence – Being Awake – Dreams – Rapture.- VI.  Combination of Ideas – Idealism.- VII.  Continuation.  The Idealist’s Dispute with the Dualist.  Truth-Drive and Approval- Drive. – Second Part.- Scientific Doctrinal Concepts of God’s Existence.- VIII.  Importance of the Investigation.  On Basedow’s Principle of the Duty to Believe.-      Axiomata.- IX.  The evidence of the pure and the applied doctrine of magnitudes. Comparison with the evidence for the proofs of God’s existence.  Different methods of those proofs.- X.  Allegorical Dream. – Reason and Common Sense.- XI.  Epicureanism. – Accident. – Chance.  A Series of Causes and Effects, without End,  without Beginning.  Progression into Infinity, Forwards and Backwards. – The  Timeless, without Beginning, without End and without Progression.- XII.  Sufficient Reason for the Contingent in the Necessary. – The former is somewhere and sometimes, the latter is everywhere and all times. – The former is only in   relation to space and time; the latter is unqualifiedly the best and most perfect. Everything that is, is best.  –  All God’s thoughts, insofar as they have the best as   their subject, attain actuality.- XIII.  Spinozism. – Pantheism. – All is One and One is All. – Refutation.- XIV.  Continued dispute with the pantheists.  –  Approximation.  –  Point of unison with them.  –  Innocuousness of the purified patheism. –  Compatibility with religion and ethics insofar as they are practical.- XV.  Lessing. – His Contribution to the Religion of Reason. – His Thoughts on Purified Pantheism.- XVI.  Elucidation of the concepts ofnecessity, contingency, independence, and dependence.  –  Attempt at a new proof for the existence of God on the basis of the incompleteness of self-knowledge.- XVII.  The a priori Grounds of Proof of the Existence of a supremely perfect, necessary, independent Being.