GERM DOCTRINE OF BONNET. 253 



its dormant state, as a butterfly deserts its chrysalis and soars 

 to new life. 



But why does Bonnet call such evolution natural? Had he 

 in mind anything comparable with the modern idea of develop- 

 ment, as a natural course of progressive differentiation ? Most 

 certainly not, for this whole scheme of palingenesia was built 

 upon the same old negation, no generation. 



This strange conception of a " mixed being," consisting of 

 one soul and three bodies, strikes one as the most unnatural 

 exaggeration of the unnatural. What more stupendous mira- 

 cle could be imagined than this trinity of germs, each awaiting 

 the reduction of the earth to chaos or ashes for its turn to un- 

 fold, and each and all presided over by a single soul ! What 

 strange revolutions planned for this soul ; what fiery ordeals 

 for its intervals of slumber ; what grand metamorphoses to be 

 triumphantly concluded in perfection and eternity ! 



What is "natural" about all this? Was not all "evolu- 

 tion" of preformed beings regarded as "natural"? What 

 exception could there be ? Bonnet was thinking of the Mosaic 

 creation, which he was trying to explain, not as an immediate 

 act of the Creator, but as a fulfilment, in a purely mechanical 

 way, of events already arranged for by the creation completed 

 at the beginning of the pre-Adamic world. Bonnet was anx- 

 ious to keep his theory free from even a shadow of contamina- 

 tion with epigenesis 1 ; hence he insisted that there had been 

 but one "creation." All the rest, Mosaic creation and resur- 

 rection, were "natural," i.e., parts of the machinery of nature 

 previously consummated. 



1 " It would be the greatest absurdity," says Bonnet, " to suppose that in the 

 first formation of animals, God commenced [after the manner of epigenesis] by 

 creating the heart, then the lungs, then the brain, etc. I do not think it would be 

 less absurd to suppose that in the formation of the universe, God began by creat- 

 ing a planet, then a sun, then another planet, etc. ... I will not affirm that at 

 the first instant of Creation all the heavenly bodies were arranged in relation to 

 one another precisely as they are to-day. That primitive arrangement may have 

 undergone many changes by a natural series of the movements of those bodies 

 and of the combination of their forces. But Divine Wisdom foresaw and ap- 

 proved those changes, as it foresaw and approved an almost infinite number of 

 modifications which arise from the structure or primitive organization of the 

 beings belonging to each world." (Paling., pp. 180-181.) 



