S24 Bwgraphkal Memoir of Charles Bonnet. 



It is in his Palingenesiey the last of his philosophical works, 

 that he best pourtrays the goodness of his character. The evils 

 that exist in the present world, and the irregularity with which 

 they are distributed, so clearly demonstrate the necessity of a 

 future state of being, for the vindication of the Divine Justice, 

 that he could not admit the one without the other ; and he had 

 too often seen pain the concomitant of sensibility in all beings, 

 to wish any of them deprived of this recompense. He therefore 

 maintains, that the faculties of the inferior animals shall be so 

 perfected as to render them capable of enjoying another life, 

 and that our principal recompense shall be a proportional de- 

 velopment of our powers. Thus, all beings will rise in the scale 

 of intellect, and happiness will consist in knowing. The works 

 of God appeared to Bonnet so excellent, that to know was with 

 him to love. 



From this brief review will be seen the truth of what we have 

 already stated, namely, that his last meditations were strictly 

 connected with his first ; that all of them, together, form a ge- 

 neral system, embracing the whole of nature, and presenting it 

 under images, if not always correct, at least always clear and 

 easy to comprehend. Those germs, multipHed to infinity, 

 sometimes inclosed thousands of times within each other, some- 

 times disseminated in the organised body, and always ready for 

 repairing the most unforeseen accident ; that original agency of 

 the Divinity ; that scale of perfections, and that ascent of de- 

 velopement ; that necessary, intermediate, subtle organ between 

 the mind and the world, the reservoir of the ideas, and the 

 cause of their association ; that connection of motives and actions 

 in the moral world, similar to that of impulse and motion in the 

 physical, formed a system of highly wrought Cartesianism, a 

 philosophy adapted to the weakness of the human mind, which 

 prefers suppositions tq vacuities in the series of its ideas. 



It is obvious, that this necessity of the influence of motives 

 would have rendered his moral system defective, had it not led 

 him to infer the necessity of a revelation, as an ultimate and 

 peremptory motive ; and it is with this inference that he con- 

 cludes the series of his philosophical meditations. Having 

 once drawn this inference, it is no longer difficult for him to de- 

 termine what revelation is the true one. Thus, from being a 



