Robinet thus laid the foundation of that view of the world as wholly vital, and as a progressive unfolding of a spiritual formative principle, which was afterwards worked out by Schelling.
Jean Baptiste Rene Robinet' followed out much the same line of thought as De Maillet, but less soberly; and Bonnet's speculations in the Palingenesie, which appeared in 1769, have already been mentioned.
Robinet, in his treatise De la nature, worked out the same conception of a gradation in organic existence, connecting this with a general view of nature as a progress from the lowest inorganic forms of matter up to man.
It is to be added that Robinet adopted a thorough-going materialistic view of the dependence of mind on body, going even to the length of assigning special nerve-fibres to the moral sense.