“Nothing is better known than the naïveté of his self-esteem; he admired himself with perfect honesty, frankly, but good-naturedly.”
He was once asked how many great men he could really mention; he answered: “Five—Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself.” His admirable style gained him immediate reputation and glory throughout the world of letters. His famous epigram, “Le style est l’homme même” is familiar to every one. That his moral courage was scarcely of a high order is proved by his little affair with the theologians of the Sorbonne. Buffon was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made.
His forte was that of a brilliant writer and most industrious compiler, a popularizer of science. He was at times a bold thinker; but his prudence, not to say timidity, in presenting in his ironical way his thoughts on the origin of things, is annoying, for we do not always understand what Buffon did really believe about the mutability or the fixity of species, as too plain speaking in the days he wrote often led to persecution and personal hazard.[125]
His cosmological ideas were based on those of Burnet and Leibnitz. His geological notions were founded on the labors of Palissy, Steno, Woodward, and Whiston. He depended upon his friend Daubenton for anatomical facts, and on Gueneau de Montbéliard and the Abbé Bexon for his zoölogical data. As Flourens says, “Buffon was not exactly an observer: others observed and discovered for him. He discovered, himself, the observations of others; he sought for ideas, others sought facts for him.” How fulsome his eulogists were is seen in the case of Flourens, who capped the climax in exclaiming, “Buffon is Leibnitz with the eloquence of Plato;” and he adds, “He did not write for savants: he wrote for all mankind.” No one now reads Buffon, while the works of Réaumur, who preceded him, are nearly as valuable as ever, since they are packed with careful observations.
The experiments of Redi, of Swammerdam, and of Vallisneri, and the observations of Réaumur, had no effect on Buffon, who maintained that, of the different forms of genesis, “spontaneous generation” is not only the most frequent and the most general, but the most ancient—namely, the primitive and the most universal.[126]
Buffon by nature was unsystematic, and he possessed little of the spirit or aim of the true investigator. He left no technical papers or memoirs, or what we would call contributions to science. In his history of animals he began with the domestic breeds, and then described those of most general, popular interest, those most known. He knew, as Malesherbes claimed, little about the works even of Linné and other systematists, neither grasping their principles nor apparently caring to know their methods. His single positive addition to zoölogical science was generalizations on the geographical distribution of animals. He recognized that the animals of the tropical and southern portions of the old and new worlds were entirely unlike, while those of North America and northern Eurasia were in many cases the same.
We will first bring together, as Flourens and also Butler have done, his scattered fragmentary views, or rather suggestions, on the fixity of species, and then present his thoughts on the mutability of species. “The species” is then “an abstract and general term.”[127] “There only exist individuals and suites of individuals, that is to say, species.”[128] He also says that Nature “imprints on each species its unalterable characters;” that “each species has an equal right to creation;”[129] that species, even those nearest allied, “are separated by an interval over which nature cannot pass;”[130] and that “each species having been independently created, the first individuals have served as a model for their descendants.”[131]
Buffon, however, shows the true scientific spirit in speaking of final causes.
“The pig,” he says, “is not formed as an original, special, and perfect type; its type is compounded of that of many other animals. It has parts which are evidently useless, or which, at any rate, it cannot use.” ... “But we, ever on the lookout to refer all parts to a certain end—when we can see no apparent use for them, suppose them to have hidden uses, and imagine connections which are without foundation, and serve only to obscure our perception of Nature as she really is: we fail to see that we thus rob philosophy of her true character, which is to inquire into the ‘how’ of these things—into the manner in which Nature acts—and that we substitute for this true object a vain idea, seeking to divine the ‘why’—the ends which she has proposed in acting” (tome v., p. 104, 1755, ex Butler).
The volumes of the Histoire naturelle on animals, beginning with tome iv., appeared in the years 1753 to 1767, or over a period of fourteen years. Butler, in his Evolution, Old and New, effectually disposes of Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s statement that at the beginning of his work (tome iv., 1753) he affirms the fixity of species, while from 1761 to 1766 he declares for variability. But Butler asserts from his reading of the first edition that “from the very first chapter onward he leant strongly to mutability, even if he did not openly avow his belief in it.... The reader who turns to Buffon himself will find that the idea that Buffon took a less advanced position in his old age than he had taken in middle life is also without foundation”[132] (p. 104).