"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." {163}
BUFFON'S METHOD--THE IRONICAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORK. (CHAPTER IX. OF
EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)
Buffon's idea of a method amounts almost to the denial of the possibility
of method at all. "The true method," he writes, "is the complete
description and exact history of each particular object," {164a} and
later on he asks, "is it not more simple, more natural and more true to
call an ass an ass, and a cat a cat, than to say, without knowing why,
that an ass is a horse, and a cat a lynx?" {164b}
He admits such divisions as between animals and vegetables, or between
vegetables and minerals, but that done, he rejects all others that can be
founded on the nature of things themselves. He concludes that one who
could see living forms as a whole and without preconceived opinions,
would classify animals according to the relations in which he found
himself standing towards them:--
"Those which he finds most necessary and useful to him will occupy the
first rank; thus he will give the precedence among the lower animals
to the dog and the horse; he will next concern himself with those
which without being domesticated, nevertheless occupy the same country
and climate as himself, as for example stags, hares, and all wild
animals; nor will it be till after he has familiarised himself with
all these that curiosity will lead him to inquire what inhabitants
there may be in foreign climates, such as elephants, dromedaries, &c.
The same will hold good for fishes, birds, insects, shells, and for
all nature's other productions; he will study them in proportion to
the profit which he can draw from them; he will consider them in that
order in which they enter into his daily life; he will arrange them in
his head according to this order, which is in fact that in which he
has become acquainted with them, and in which it concerns him to think
about them, This order--the most natural of all--is the one which I
have thought it well to follow in this volume. My classification has
no more mystery in it than the reader has just seen . . . it is
preferable to the most profound and ingenious that can be conceived,
for there is none of all the classifications which ever have been made
or ever can be, which has not more of an arbitrary character than this
has. Take it for all in all," he concludes, "it is more easy, more
agreeable, and more useful, to consider things in their relation to
ourselves than from any other standpoint." {165}
"Has it not a better effect not only in a treatise on natural history,
but in a picture or any work of art to arrange objects in the order
and place in which they are commonly found, than to force them into
association in virtue of some theory of our own? Is it not better to
let the dog which has toes, come after the horse which has a single
hoof, in the same way as we see him follow the horse in daily life,
than to follow up the horse by the zebra, an animal which is little
known to us, and which has no other connection with the horse than the
fact that it has a single hoof?" {166a}
Can we suppose that Buffon really saw no more connection than this? The
writer whom we shall presently find {166b} declining to admit any
essential difference between the skeletons of man and of the horse, can
here see no resemblance between the zebra and the horse, except that they
each have a single hoof. Is he to be taken at his word?
It is perhaps necessary to tell the reader that Buffon carried the
foregoing scheme into practice as nearly as he could in the first fifteen
volumes of his Natural History. He begins with man--and then goes on to
the horse, the ass, the cow, sheep, goat, pig, dog, &c. One would be
glad to know whether he found it always more easy to know in what order
of familiarity this or that animal would stand to the majority of his
readers than other classifiers have found it to know whether an
individual more resembles one species or another; probably he never gave
the matter a thought after he had gone through the first dozen most
familiar animals, but settled generally down into a classification which
becomes more and more specific--as when he treats of the apes and
monkeys--till he reaches the birds, when he openly abandons his original
idea, in deference, as he says, to the opinion of "le peuple des
naturalistes."
Perhaps the key to this piece of apparent extravagance is to be found in
the word "mysterieuse." {166c} Buffon wished to raise a standing protest
against mystery mongering. Or perhaps more probably, he wished at once
to turn to animals under domestication, so as to insist early on the main
object of his work--the plasticity of animal forms.
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. It must
be remembered that his Natural History has two sides,--a scientific and a
popular one. May we not imagine that Buffon would be unwilling to debar
himself from speaking to those who could understand him, and yet would
wish like Handel and Shakespeare to address the many, as well as the few?
But the only manner in which these seemingly irreconcilable ends could be
attained, would be by the use of language which should be self-adjusting
to the capacity of the reader. So keen an observer can hardly have been
blind to the signs of the times which were already close at hand. Free-
thinker though he was, he was also a powerful member of the aristocracy,
and little likely to demean himself--for so he would doubtless hold it--by
playing the part of Voltaire or Rousseau. He would help those who could
see to see still further, but he would not dazzle eyes that were yet
imperfect with a light brighter than they could stand. He would
therefore impose upon people, as much as he thought was for their good;
but, on the other hand, he would not allow inferior men to mystify them.
"In the private character of Buffon," says Sir William Jardine in a
characteristic passage, "we regret there is not much to praise; his
disposition was kind and benevolent, and he was generally beloved by his
inferiors, followers, and dependants, which were numerous over his
extensive property; he was strictly honourable, and was an affectionate
parent. In early youth he had entered into the pleasures and
dissipations of life, and licentious habits seem to have been retained to
the end. But the great blemish in such a mind was his declared
infidelity; it presents one of those exceptions among the persons who
have been devoted to the study of nature; and it is not easy to imagine a
mind apparently with such powers, scarcely acknowledging a Creator, and
when noticed, only by an arraignment for what appeared wanting or
defective in His great works. So openly, indeed, was the freedom of his
religious opinions expressed, that the indignation of the Sorbonne was
provoked. He had to enter into an explanation which he in some way
rendered satisfactory; and while he afterwards attended to the outward
ordinances of religion, he considered them as a system of faith for the
multitude, and regarded those most impolitic who most opposed them."
{168}
This is partly correct and partly not. Buffon was a free-thinker, and as
I have sufficiently explained, a decided opponent of the doctrine that
rudimentary and therefore useless organs were designed by a Creator in
order to serve some useful end throughout all time to the creature in
which they are found.
He was not, surely, to hide the magnificent conceptions which he had been
the first to grasp, from those who were worthy to receive them; on the
other hand he would not tell the uninstructed what they would interpret
as a licence to do whatever they pleased, inasmuch as there was no God.
What he did was to point so irresistibly in the right direction, that a
reader of any intelligence should be in no doubt as to the road he ought
to take, and then to contradict himself so flatly as to reassure those
who would be shocked by a truth for which they were not yet ready. If I
am right in the view which I have taken of Buffon's work, it is not easy
to see how he could have formed a finer scheme, nor have carried it out
more finely.
I should, however, warn the reader to be on his guard against accepting
my view too hastily. So far as I know I stand alone in taking it.
Neither Dr. Darwin, nor Flourens, nor Isidore Geoffroy, nor Mr. Charles
Darwin see any subrisive humour in Buffon's pages; but it must be
remembered that Flourens was a strong opponent of mutability, and
probably paid but little heed to what Buffon said on this question;
Isidore Geoffroy is not a safe guide, few men indeed less so. Mr.
Charles Darwin seems to have adopted the one half of Isidore Geoffrey's
conclusions without verifying either; and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who has no
small share of a very pleasant conscious humour, yet sometimes rises to
such heights of unconscious humour, that Buffon's puny labour may well
have been invisible to him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry,
some of which was about the common pump. Miss Seward tells us, that he
"illustrated this familiar object with a picture of Maternal Beauty
administering sustenance to her infant." Buffon could not have done
anything like this.
Buffon never, then, "arraigned the Creator for what was wanting or
defective in His works;" on the contrary, whenever he was led up by an
irresistible chain of reasoning to conclusions which should make men
recast their ideas concerning the Deity, he invariably retreats under
cover of an appeal to revelation. Naturally enough, the Sorbonne
objected to an artifice which even Buffon could not conceal completely.
They did not like being undermined; like Buffon himself, they preferred
imposing upon the people, to seeing others do so. Buffon made his peace
with the Sorbonne immediately, and, perhaps, from that time forward,
contradicted himself a little more impudently than heretofore.
It is probably for the reasons above suggested that Buffon did not
propound a connected scheme of evolution or descent with modification,
but scattered his theory in fragments up and down his work in the
prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or
classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface
to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more
evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the
animal more familiarly--and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half
chapter when he does so--he writes no more about evolution, but gives an
admirable description, which no one can fail to enjoy, and which I cannot
think is nearly so inaccurate as is commonly supposed. These
descriptions are the parts which Buffon intended for the general reader,
expecting, doubtless, and desiring that such a reader should skip the dry
parts he had been addressing to the more studious. It is true the
descriptions are written _ad captandum_, as are all great works, but they
succeed in captivating, having been composed with all the pains a man of
genius and of great perseverance could bestow upon them. If I am not
mistaken, he looked to these parts of his work to keep the whole alive
till the time should come when the philosophical side of his writings
should be understood and appreciated.
Thus the goat breeds with the sheep, and may therefore serve as the text
for a dissertation on hybridism, which is accordingly given in the
preface to this animal. The presence of rudimentary organs under a pig's
hoof suggests an attack upon the doctrine of final causes in so far as it
is pretended that every part of every animal or plant was specially
designed with a view to the wants of the animal or plant itself, once and
forever throughout all time. The dog with his great variety of breeds
gives an opportunity for an article on the formation of breeds and sub-
breeds by man's artificial selection. The cat is not honoured with any
philosophical reflection, and comes in for nothing but abuse. The hare
suggests the rabbit, and the rabbit is a rapid breeder, although the hare
is an unusually slow one; but this is near enough, so the hare shall
serve us for the theme of a discourse on the geometrical ratio of
increase and the balance of power which may be observed in nature. When
we come to the carnivora, additional reflections follow upon the
necessity for death, and even for violent death; this leads to the
question whether the creatures that are killed suffer pain; here, then,
will be the proper place for considering the sensations of animals
generally.
Perhaps the most pregnant passage concerning evolution is to be found in
the preface to the ass, which is so near the beginning of the work as to
be only the second animal of which Buffon treats after having described
man himself. It points strongly in the direction of his having believed
all animal forms to have been descended from one single common ancestral
type. Buffon did not probably choose to take his very first opportunity
in order to insist upon matter that should point in this direction; but
the considerations were too important to be deferred long, and are
accordingly put forward under cover of the ass, his second animal.
When we consider the force with which Buffon's conclusion is led up to;
the obviousness of the conclusion itself when the premises are once
admitted; the impossibility that such a conclusion should be again lost
sight of if the reasonableness of its being drawn had been once admitted;
the position in his scheme which is assigned to it by its propounder; the
persistency with which he demonstrates during forty years thereafter that
the premises, which he has declared should establish the conclusion in
question, are indisputable;--when we consider, too, that we are dealing
with a man of unquestionable genius, and that the times and circumstances
of his life were such as would go far to explain reserve and irony--is
it, I would ask, reasonable to suppose that Buffon did not in his own
mind, and from the first, draw the inference to which he leads his
reader, merely because from time to time he tells the reader, with a
shrug of the shoulders, that _he_ draws no inferences opposed to the Book
of Genesis? Is it not more likely that Buffon intended his reader to
draw his inferences for himself, and perhaps to value them all the more
highly on that account?