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grievances, became possible. The Enlightenment encouraged questioning of all the assumptions on which the ancien régime was based, and made it easier to think of change as progress. The old class system was already being undermined by the rise of industry, status became increasingly a factor of wealth rather than family lineage. Heredity cannot be changed, wealth can; this made it easier to believe that all men were created equal, birth alone does not make one man superior to another. Bräker probably never fully realised this; even at the end of his life, when he writes about Daniel Girtanner, he seems quite puzzled by the fact that Girtanner, who had so many advantages over him, could yet call him friend. He also writes with scorn for the agitators who brought revolution to the Toggenburg, regarding them as complete self-seekers; the idea that they might be inspired by some vision for the future seems to have escaped him completely. For fear of worse, he was willing to tolerate a regime that was backward even by the standards of Switzerland as a whole, and the idea of "natural rights", even if he fully understood it, probably would not have changed his attitude much.

Another important factor in Enlightenment thinking was the increase in knowledge brought by explorers and travellers outside Europe. Their reports brought not only knowledge of more of the natural world, but of new human worlds also. Readers of these accounts learn that many so-called savages did not in fact live like brute beasts but had social institutions quite different from, but equally as complex as, those of Europe, under which they were able to live as contentedly and as virtuously as any European. This at first tended to confirm the Enlightenment belief in innate good impulses in all human beings, and led to some rather naïve philosophising about the "noble savage". It also demonstrated, however, how strongly the behaviour of human beings is influenced by their environment, by the climate for example, and by the social structures that they live in. We know that Bräker enjoyed reading travel books, though he admitted that they increased his discontent with his humdrum life, but he could have been disturbed by the idea that morality is largely a matter of local custom. We also know that Bräker enjoyed reading history, particularly recent history. The historians of the Enlightenment, however, had begun to discard the idea of history as the working-out of God's providence, they demonstrated the material causes and effects of events, and showed how hard it is for individuals and nations to escape their past.

I think it would therefore be a mistake to say that Bräker accepted everything that the Enlightenment could teach him, and in some respects it may have added to his frustrations and perplexities. The struggle between his natural desires and the scruples of his Pietist upbringing became a three-cornered fight with the encounter with Enlightenment ideas, and for the first few years after 1776 this may have made his mental life even more uncomfortable than before. It was a struggle that was never fully resolved, but his faith in the goodness of God, especially as revealed through nature, and his (possibly sometimes exaggerated) faith in the goodness of some chosen men, the "friends of humanity", helped him to hold some kind of a balance between the warring factions in his own mind. His self-taught scholarship, alone in the Moral Society's library or at home, prepared him for the wider world of letters which he entered later, when he himself became an author. To his publisher Fü ssli and the other educated men he encountered, he would have seemed an unsophisticated peasant, but in fact he had come a very long way in a short time.

In one of his dialogues written in the following year, he proclaims this through his mouthpiece Fridli: "Should men not be able to become ever wiser? No, I cannot believe that Heaven has destined us human beings to such a sad and unpeaceful life. Bowed down and sullen of features, to go all about as eccentrics in our dress and gestures. Eternal Wisdom, Thou knowest the most secret thoughts of my heart. I honour Thee, I adore Thee in all Thy works. Shall I spurn with hands and feet the contentment of heart and those innocent joys, that Thy love has granted to me?" [Voellmy, v 2 p 111]

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