Abstract

Buffon is a paradoxical figure in the history of empiricism. Even though he published 36 volumes of a monumental natural history, his work is often depicted as systematic, and lacking any empirical background. His physique is depicted as an over-inflated rhetorical device, and a traditional comment on his Histoire naturelle was that this natural history was “not so natural ”. Lastly, Daubenton’s contribution to comparative anatomy is often praised as the most valuable part of Buffon’s impressive collection of texts.This paper aims at specifying the philosophical character of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and to describe it as a new form of “système de philosophie”. I claim that the systematic character of Buffon’s Natural history does not equate it with a mere heap of vain hypotheses. I distinguish between two different conceptions of systems: the system as arbitrary or hypothetical construction; the system as a positive body of doctrine, where knowledge constitutes a set of interrelated data, rather than the membra disjecta of singular observations. According to Buffon in 1783, the best système is the presentation of the relations discovered by means of comparison. I claim that this definition is not a paradoxical statement by a senile old man, oblivious of his empiricist duties; but that it is rather the culmination of Buffon’s philosophical methodology, firmly established since at least the 1740s: his conviction that science rests not on the mere collection of facts, but on a logic based on their mutual comparison and the understanding of their bearings.