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flourish if all obstacles imposed by tyrannical government, obscurantist religion and so forth, were replaced by laws and social institutions based on reason.

This belief, however, was soon challenged by those who with equal claims to be reasonable took a more pessimistic view of human nature. The historian Konigsberger points out that Voltaire's satire "Candide", which ridicules the idea that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds", was published in 1758, only seven years later than the first volume of the Encyclopedia. The horrors of the great earthquake at Lisbon (1755) and the Seven Years' War (1756-63) shook the confidence of the Enlightenment philosophers in the benevolence of God, Nature and mankind.

This was not the only respect in which the Enlightenment can be seen with hindsight as self-contradictory, chiefly, perhaps, because its challenge to established order has been seen as facilitating if not actively promoting much bloodshed in further wars and revolutions at the end of the century. Both then and since it has been noticed that many of the Enlightenment thinkers were of very dubious personal morals, and being enlightened did not stop many of them from being arrogant, élitist, cliquey and even intolerant, especially in matters of morals, social policy, and their own position in society. Snobbery and willingness to form factions can certainly be seen in the history of Bräker's Moral Society, in which he was made to feel like "the crow who wanted to fly with the ducks". Yet the Enlightenment also has great achievements to its credit, some of the greatest evils of the time, such as slavery, judicial torture, abuses of power by the churches, the persecution of witches and Jews, were openly and successfully attacked. Some of the great reforms of the 19th century, such as the better treatment of the poor, prisoners and industrial workers have their foundations in the Enlightenment. It also marks the beginning of modern scholarship in its use of research methods, experiment and systematic data collection.

At the time, perhaps, the greatest problem with Enlightenment thinking was that it generally ignored the existence of human emotions, and regarded as regressive the human need for faith and ideals that transcend the boundaries of reason. Harold Nicolson in "The Age of Reason" says that the thinkers of the Enlightenment "generated light without warmth". This could be taken as a figurative way of saying that they broke down the old certainties by which most people had been living, but could not provide anything to sustain the human spirit in the same way. It is not difficult to discern all kinds of cultural cross-currents throughout the century whose foundations went beyond the bounds of reason, from schismatic sects to utopian communities, to idealistic movements such as the Illuminati, to widespread interest in occultism and pseudo-science, all of which attracted people who were well educated by the standards of the time. The famously successful con-artists of the century such as Giacomo Casanova and "Count" Cagliostro, or sincere but deluded theorists such as Mesmer, could not have flourished as they did if a belief in the miraculous had not persisted among their followers.

By the time that Bräker came under its influence, the Enlightenment was already losing ground to the backlash cultural movements which prevailed towards the end of the century, to the cult of feeling which sometimes led to excessive and uncontrolled emotion, but could be seen as an attempt to find new certainties by setting a high value on the nobler aspects of human nature such as love, friendship and compassion. As Jane Austen put it, "Sense" [intellect] and "Sensibility" [feeling] were obliged to try to come to terms with one another. One certainly cannot accuse the Enlightenment of suppressing human emotion in the Poor Man of Toggenburg, indeed his widened horizons led him to acknowledge his own feelings, in his writing at least, to a greater extent than before.

One can easily understand, moreover, that Bräker would have found the writings and discussions of the Enlightenment enormously liberating. He would have felt that he had found justification for two of the strongest traits in his character: his love of nature and his desire for earthly happiness. The discovery of the complexity and interdependence of the natural world allowed its thinkers to extol Nature almost as a substitute for the God of revealed religion.

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