Poland May 25, 1661, of French parents, who returned to their native country shortly after their son s birth, and settled at Rouen. He was educated at the Jesuits college there, and was received into the order at the age of nineteen. Soon after his admission a dispute with the archbishop regarding certain points in theology compelled him to leave Eouen. He went to Rome, but did not long remain there ; and ou his return to France he retired to the college of the Jesuits at Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, studying and writing, and fulfilling with much success his duties as a college lecturer. He seems indeed to have been an admirable teacher, having, as his works show, a great power of lucid and precise exposition. Buffiers object in his Traite des vcritcs ytrcmieres, his best known philo sophical work, is to discover the ultimate principles upon which all knowledge is based, to lay down " propositions so clear and obvious that they can neither be proved nor refuted by other propositions of greater perspicuity." The basis of all human knowledge and the foundation of every other truth he finds in the sense we have of our own exis tence and of what we feel within ourselves. He thus takes as the foundation of his philosophy substantially the same ground as Descartes, cogito ergo sum ; but the superstruc ture is reared on very different principles. Descartes tried to reach a knowledge of the not-self by an a priori or metaphysical proof of the divine existence. Buffier rejects this sort of evidence as useless. I want, he in effect says, to obtain a certain knowledge of what is distinct from myself, and this I can never do by mere metaphysical demonstration, which only gives me the hypothetical cer tainty of ideas logically connected together; in order to know what exists distinct from myself I must have re course to " common sense." Common sense he defines to be " that disposition which nature has placed in all or most men, in order to enable them, when they have arrived at the age and use of reason, to form a common and uniform judgment with respect to objects different from the internal sentiment of their own perception, which judgment is not the consequence of any anterior principle." The truths which this " disposition of nature" obliges us to accept can neither be proved nor disproved ; they are admitted in all countries and at all times ; and they are practically followed by all men, even by those who reject them speculatively. But Buffier does not claim for the truths of common sense the same absolute certainty as characterizes either the knowledge we have of oar own existence or the logical deductions we make from our thoughts; they possess merely the highest probability, and the man who rejects them is, as he pointedly puts it, to be considered a fool, but he is not in so doing guilty of a con tradiction. The greater part of the Traite is devoted to an enumeration and examination of those truths. They are such as the following : " There are other beings and other men in the world besides myself;" "All men have not combined to deceive me." But axioms like "2 + 2 = 4," or " the whole is greater than a part " are mere logical con nections of ideas, not truths of common sense. Buffier s aversion to scholastic refinements and unmeaning defini tions has not unfrequently given to his writings an appear ance of shallowncss and want of metaphysical insight; but his merit as one of the earliest to recognize the psycho logical as distinguished from the metaphysical side of Descartes s principle, and to use it, with no inconsiderable skill, as the basis of an analysis of the human mind, similar to that enjoined by Locke, will always be acknowledged. In this he has anticipated the spirit and method as well as many of the results of Reid and the Scotch school. The Traite appeared in 1717, and was followed in 1724 by the Elements de Metaphysique. Burner also wrote a "French Grammar on a new plan," and a number of historical essays. Most of his works appeared in a collected form in 1732, and an English translation of the Traite was pub
lished in 1780.BUFFON, George Louis Leclerc, Comte de, was born on 7th September 1707, at Montbard, in Burgundy, and died at Paris on the 15th April 1788. His father, M. Leclerc de Buffon, was councillor of the Burgundian parliament, and his mother, Anne Christine Marlin, appears to have possessed considerable natural gifts. Buffon was the eldest of five children, and does not seem to have been in any way a precocious child. On the contrary, he seems from his earliest years to have been characterized more especially by great perseverance, patience, knowledge of the value of time, and exceptional powers of steady appli cation and protracted labour. He was originally destined to his father s profession, and studied law at the college of Jesuits at Dijon ; but he soon exhibited a marked predilec tion for the study of the physical sciences, and more particularly for mathematics. Whilst at Dijon he made the acquaintance of Lord Kingston, a young Englishman, who was at the time staying there along with his tutor, a man of ability and discernment. In this agreeable com panionship, Buffon travelled through Italy, being then nineteen years of age. Returning to France, he commenced to study at Angers, still in company with Lord Kingston ; but having quarrelled with a young Englishman at play, and subsequently wounded him, he was compelled to leave this town. He thereupon removed to Paris, and during his sojourn in the capital he translated Newton s Fluxions and Hales s Vegetable /Statics, which he subsequently presented to the Academy of Sciences. From Paris he proceeded to England, where he remained three months ; but his travels seem to have ended here. At twenty-five years of age he succeeded to a considerable property, inherited from his mother, and from this time onward his life was a completely independent one, and he was enabled to devote himself entirely to his scientific pursuits. He returned now to France, and lived partly at Montbard and partly at Paris.
Though loving pleasure, and not keeping himself free from the prevalent vices of the age in which he lived, Buffo u spent the remainder of his life in regular scientific labour, employing an amanuensis, and thus securing a permanent record of his work. At first he directed his attention more especially to mathematics, physics, and agriculture, and his chief original papers are connected with these subjects. In the spring of 1739 he was elected a member of the- Academy of Sciences ; and at a later period of the same year he was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi and of the Royal Museum. This appears to have finally deter mined him to devote himself to the biological sciences in particular, and he commenced to collect materials for his Natural History. In the preparation of this voluminous work, he associated with himself Daubenton, to whom the descriptive and anatomical portions of the treatise were entrusted, and the first three volumes made their appear ance in the year 1749. In the year 1752 (not in 1743 or 1760, as sometimes stated), he married Marie Frangoise de Saint-Belin. He seems to have been fondly attached to her, and felt deeply her death, which took place at Mont bard in 1769. The remainder of Buffon s life, as a private individual, presents nothing of special interest. He belonged to a very long-lived race, his father having attained the age of ninety-three, and his grandfather eighty-seven years. He died himself at the age of eighty-one, of vesical calculus, having refused to allow of any operation for his relief. He left one son, George Louis-Marie Leclerc, who was an officer in the French army, and who died by the guillotine, at the age of thirty, on the 10th July 1793 (22 Messidor, An II.), having espoused the party of the duke of Orleans.
