1X8 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



laws. In this, however, he was not entirely consistent. In a curious treatise 

 entitled Homo duplex he has described man as composed of two principles, 

 fundamentally distinct from one another, one spiritual and the other material, 

 of which the material develops first and predominates in the embryonic stage 

 and during childhood, while the spiritual appears later and is developed by 

 means of education and training, without which it would lead to stupidity 

 and vain delusions. This dualistic conception of man might well appear to be 

 fully in accordance with the principles that had till then been and were still 

 at that time officially recognized — it might be suspected that BufFon here 

 made a concession to the ecclesiastical authorities who had persecuted him — 

 had not the style of the whole been so utterly different from all that is under- 

 stood by conventional religion. Instead we here come across a trait in Buffon 

 which we should not expect to find in that exceedingly brilliant and suc- 

 cessful man — namely, a deep pessimism. To his mind, the contrast between 

 spiritual and material appears most marked in those attacks of melancholy 

 and listlessness when one lacks all power of decision, when one "does what 

 one would not and would do what one does not ' ' : when one feels that the 

 personality is divided into two, of which the one part, reason, indicts the 

 other without being able to overcome its resistance; sometimes reason wins, 

 and then one performs one's duties gladly; sometimes the flesh wins, and 

 then one indulges in pleasure, but sooner or later these unhappy hours and 

 days return when disharmony prevails. Especially vivid is the passage in 

 which Buffon describes how love, which makes animals happy, simply 

 makes men wretched; in words of wild despair he depicts the vainness and 

 folly of this passion, which certainly brings with it bodily satisfaction, but 

 is morally valueless and only calls forth jealousy and other degenerate feel- 

 ings. This melancholy conception of life was, as a matter of fact, in no way 

 peculiar to Buffon; it was, on the contrary, as we shall see later on, a wide- 

 spread view during the epoch to which he belonged. 



Buffon' s influence 

 Buffon has played a fundamental part in the history of biology, not on ac- 

 count of the discoveries he made, but on account of the new ideas he produced. 

 Those ideas that he brought out, which he was able only imperfectly to 

 realize in detail, have since then been taken up by others, who, having better 

 opportunities for obtaining actual scientific material, have applied them in a 

 wider sense: thus, Cuvier, the pioneer of comparative anatomy and paleon- 

 tology, adopted many of Buffon's fundamental ideas; similarly Bichat, the 

 originator of the tissue theory, in his sphere, as well as Lamarck, with his 

 theories of the evolution of living organisms, in that field, has manifestly 

 felt the influence of Buffon's speculations. Through these scientists many of 

 the ideas produced by Buffon have now been incorporated in the general 

 knowledge of natural science. If in spite of this he has often been depicted, 



