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Updated: May 10, 2025
"But whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away . . . and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Buffon's idea of a method amounts almost to the denial of the possibility of method at all.
Famous phrases have been made about it, to be sure; but most of these, like that corrupted from Buffon's cursory remark in his discourse of reception into the Academy "Le style est de l'homme même," are lofty admissions of the impossibility of definition. By this fact we are fortified in our opinion that style is a matter of feeling rather than of intellect.
Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue, the love of glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which follows the age of the passions."
"This man," exclaimed Hume, with an admiration which surprised him out of his scepticism, "this man gives to things which no human eye has seen a probability almost equal to evidence." Some of Buffon's theories have been disputed by his successors' science; as D'Alembert said of Descartes: "If he was mistaken about the laws of motion, he was the first to divine that there must be some."
I think it must have been the beasts that made me take to reading: I was so fond of Buffon's Natural History, of which there was an English abridgment on the dining-room bookshelves.
A huge tome, full of quaint pictures of gods and goddesses, and angels and devils, on which we were never tired or gazing; infinitely preferring the latter, with their curious tails and horns, to the former; whom we called, 'Fat lazy-looking children with wings. 'Goldsmith's World, 'Buffon's Natural History, and the whole family of Encyclopedias, with their numerous prints, were among our chief favourites, and helped to beguile the long wet day.
It is needless to inquire how far these statements are strictly accurate; they are sufficiently so to justify Buffon's conclusions that the dry land was once beneath the sea; that the formation of the fossiliferous rocks must have occupied a vastly greater lapse of time than that traditionally ascribed to the age of the earth; that fossil remains indicate different climatal conditions to have obtained in former times, and especially that the polar regions were once warmer; that many species of animals and plants have become extinct; and that geological change has had something to do with geographical distribution.
I am inclined to think that a vein of irony pervades the whole or much the greater part of Buffon's work, and that he intended to convey one meaning to one set of readers, and another to another; indeed, it is often impossible to believe that he is not writing between his lines for the discerning, what the undiscerning were not intended to see.
From Buffon's work it was learned by the German philosopher Kant, who published a fresh theory of the concentration of scattered particles into fiery worlds. That is the genealogy of the famous nebular hypothesis. It did not spring full-formed from the brain of either Kant or Laplace, like Athene from the brain of Zeus. Laplace had one great advantage over the early speculators.
Shelley sometimes fell asleep during the performance of these rites; but when he woke refreshed with slumber, he was no less ready than at Oxford to support philosophical paradoxes with impassioned and persuasive eloquence. He began to teach Harriet Latin, set her to work upon the translation of a French story by Madame Cottin, and for his own part executed a version of one of Buffon's treatises.
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