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He might also have felt some satisfaction from learning the new thinking on matters of education, especially the new attention being given to practical knowledge. The universities of his day remained very conservative in matters of curriculum, but new institutions were being founded to study (for instance) agriculture and mining. The Moral Society was not exactly at the forefront of technological developments, since the majority of its members were clergymen, but hearing of developments elsewhere could have led Bräker to value his own knowledge more highly. As regards education in general, the Enlightenment thinkers believed in working with a child's natural tendencies rather than against them, and developing self-control by reasoning rather than by forcible imposition of facts or faith by threats and punishment. Bräker points out several times the ineffectiveness of his wife's methods of child rearing by nagging and scolding. He would now be confirmed in his view that there had to be a better way of going about it.

Like many under-educated people, Bräker placed a very high value on education, and greatly admired people better educated than himself. His uncritical attitude to such people may well mean that he accepted their self-appointment as founders of a society governed by reason, backed up if necessary by "enlightened" rulers. The idea that the working classes might be capable of enlightening themselves did not have much currency until the following century. This would not have prevented him, however, from being sensitive to the snobbery he encountered in the Moral Society. Quite possibly it was the failure to find congenial company among his neighbours or the Moral Society that led to his rather overheated enthusiasm for the more sophisticated friends that he met later, when he had become known as a writer. At first, however, it must have been a great relief to him to be enabled to see his natural curiosity and desire for happiness as good qualities rather than bad.

There were other aspects of the Enlightenment, however, that did not accord at all with Bräker's way of thinking. Some of these would have been consciously rejected, others perhaps unconsciously. He probably realised that strict adherence to what can be verified by reason, carried to its logical conclusion, could result in the undermining of faith. The concept of the universe as a perfect system "going like clockwork" as we say, had led some Enlightenment thinkers to regard God as a clockmaker, who having wound up the universe had let it tick away without further intervention, or even to dismiss the existence of God altogether and regard the universe, including mankind, as no more than a great mechanical system. I doubt if Bräker ever went far down that path. Meditations in his diaries around the time of Christmas suggest that he had doubts about the divinity of Christ, and towards the end of his life he seems to have questioned whether death would bring an after-life or total annihilation, but I can find no evidence that he ever completely gave up his faith, though it certainly changed as he grew older.

He probably did not perceive the part that Enlightenment thinking played in the political upheavals at the end of the century, which brought the wholesale destruction of the older way of life in France and eventually in his own country. The Enlightenment thinkers went on from seeing the physical universe as a system to trying to construct a similar rational and unified system for human nature. Their desire for unity in belief is easily understood as a hope of preventing a return to the conflicts of the past. Similarly they wished to abolish the worst abuses of the political systems then in force by replacing them with a system based on objective observation of universal human nature, a system which all mankind could readily accept. Schemes for the better organisation of society multiplied on all sides, and were seriously discussed and criticised, but at first there was little attempt to try them out in practice. The American revolution had already shown that some new ideals, such as republicanism, popular sovereignty and equal rights could be expressed in a constitution, but at this stage in Bräker's life it was much too early to say how successful such a constitution might be in practice.

In theory, however, the idea of "natural religion", that is a religion which harmonised with the universal constants of human nature, could lead to the idea of "natural law" and eventually "natural rights". Revolution was not directly promoted, but the new way of thinking created a mental atmosphere where revolution, of a more far-reaching kind than local protests against local

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