BONNET AND HALLER 405 



kindly at the more dogmatic orthodoxy of Haller. He was bent 

 on reconciling Science and Metaphysics, Philosophy and Religion. 

 He succeeded in doing so to his own satisfaction ; for his wishes 

 often controlled his thoughts. Starting from the conviction that 

 the world and life are the result of a single act of creation, that 

 matter and spirit, though separate, are susceptible of the 

 most intimate connection, capable of infinite development, and 

 both indestructible, he believed in an advance of the whole crea- 

 tion towards perfection. Assuming a supreme and benevolent 

 power outside and above phenomena, he argued that the uni- 

 verse moves onwards by a continual progression of innumerable 

 germs in ever-varying and developing combinations in which 

 nothing perishes, but every germ passes on to a higher degree of 

 consciousness. He recognised in man a spiritual energy, a soul, 

 incorporated in the human body and working through it, which 

 survives its temporary frame and passes on to higher forms of 

 existence. But while professedly an idealist, he assigned so large 

 a part in the formation of ideas to sensation, to the action of the 

 nerves and tissues of the physical frame, that he fell under some 

 suspicion of materialism. 



Bonnet's physiology may seem to modern students in parts 

 faulty, his metaphysics vague, many of his assumptions question- 

 able. Yet his teaching supplied a want in his generation. It 

 served more or less as a buffer between the orthodox creeds of 

 Geneva and Rome and the negative dogmatism of the Encyclo- 

 paedists. 'Bonnet,' writes Sayous, a competent and impartial 

 critic, ' is met with everywhere in the moral and philosophic 

 literature of the eighteenth century. There was hardly a country 

 where he did not find admirers, he had correspondents in Sweden, 

 Denmark, and Russia, at the Hague, Berlin, and Hamburg.' 

 London might have been added. Yet so persuasively did he 

 put forward his theories that he never came into any serious con- 

 troversy with the rigid Protestantism of Geneva. This was no 

 doubt in part due to the personal charm, the charity and modesty, 

 which his contemporaries vie in recognising. 



Cuvier, in a passage in the eulogy he pronounced on Bonnet 

 some years after his death, while summing up the argument of 

 Bonnet's last and chief work, the PalingenesiePhilosophique(nQQ), 

 pays a singular tribute to his character and its influence on his 



