Works
His object in the Traité des vérités prèmieres (1717), his best-known work, is to discover the ultimate principle of knowledge. This he finds in the sense we have of our own existence and of what we feel within ourselves, He thus takes substantially the same ground as Descartes, but he rejected the a priori method. In order to know what exists distinct from the self, common sense is necessary. Common sense he defined as 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 judgment.
The truths which this disposition of nature obliges us to accept can be neither proved nor disproved; they are practically followed even by those who reject them speculatively. But Buffier does not claim for these truths of common sense the absolute certainty which characterizes the knowledge we have of our own existence or the logical deductions we make from our thoughts; they possess merely the highest probability, and the man who rejects them is to be considered a fool, though he is not guilty of a contradiction.
Buffier's aversion to scholastic refinements has given to his writings an appearance of shallowness and want of metaphysical insight, and unquestionably he failed entirely even to indicate the nature of that universality and necessity which he ascribed to his eternal verities; he was, however, one of the earliest to recognize the psychological 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. In this he has anticipated Thomas Reid and the Scottish school. Voltaire described him as the only Jesuit who has given a reasonable system of philosophy.
He wrote also Elements de metaphysique (1724), 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 Traité was published in 1780.
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“We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately, we had no business in this country.”
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