Thierry Hoquet. Buffon: Histoire naturelle et philosophie .Buffon: Histoire naturelle et philosophie by Thierry HoquetReview by: By Cédric   CrémièreIsis, Vol. 99, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 839-840Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597704 .

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isodic, stop-and-go character casts doubt that em-pirical knowledge accumulated. Each episode—from Robert Hooke’s investigations in the 1660sto those of Alexander von Humboldt or the BritishAssociation in the nineteenth century—should besituated in its own context; the history should bewritten not from a search for precedent for laterevents but with an eye to what the researchers hadhoped to achieve. In eighteenth-century Britain,researchers produced a knowledge of regional cli-mates, they connected the weather to a wider geo-graphical awareness, and they sought to associateit with human life. They also learned, however, thelimits of the enterprise and that, contrary to En-lightenment ideals, cultural change was incom-plete. “The persistence of traditional weather lore,proverbs, and sayings . . . reminded investigatorsthat their society had not been totally enlightened”(p. 213). British Weather and the Climate of En-lightenment is much more than a history of mete-orology.

GREG GOOD

Thierry Hoquet. Buffon: Histoire naturelle etphilosophie. (Les Dix-Huitieme Siecles, 92.)809 pp., app., index. Paris: Honore Champion,2005. €115 (cloth).

Thierry Hoquet’s volume is a published versionof his Ph.D. thesis, earned in 2002 from theUniversity of Montpellier. Hoquet locates thework and thought of Georges-Louis LeClerc,comte de Buffon, in the “tree of science” (p. 35).This study breaks down Buffon’s method andstructure of thought as it is found in the firstfifteen volumes of the Histoire naturelle (1749–1767), including introductory essays and the de-scriptions of quadrupeds. This large book (morethan 754 pages of text without the bibliography)is divided into four parts and sixteen chaptersthat consider the particularity of the Histoirenaturelle, the status of the sciences treated byBuffon, the singularity of Buffon’s new method,and his fight against a theological interpretationof natural phenomena.

Referring to Francis Bacon, Hoquet demon-strates that the Histoire naturelle is not a naturalhistory. Buffon does not merely collect the factsbut develops a real system of nature. Linking thefacts by the use of analogy, he thus works outwhat is more a natural philosophy than a naturalhistory. The systematic use of analogy leads to aprivileged form of knowledge based on compar-ison.

This strategy allows Buffon to critique clas-sifications and mathematics. Buffon’s criticismof Linnaeus’s classifications is an example of

how the Histoire naturelle is not just a classify-ing enterprise. So Buffon’s natural philosophy ishistorical and not mathematical because it is ascience of connection and not of quantity. Buf-fon’s concerns along these lines recur in latertexts, such the Histoire naturelle des mineraux:“It is easy to feel we do not know anythingexcept by comparison, and that we cannot judgethings and their connections until we have or-dered them, that is to say in a system” ([Imprim-erie Royale, 1783], Vol. 26, p. 344). In theintroductory essays (“Histoire et theorie de laTerre,” “De la formation des planets,” “De lageneration des animaux”) of the Histoire na-turelle Buffon shows the originality of histhought in applying the method of comparisonas a means to choose the best of “a set ofproposed systems” (p. 449). With regard tometaphysics, he rejects final and primary causesand prefers efficient and secondary ones in hisunderstanding of nature.

Hoquet’s essay is a philosophical and not abiographical one. But Buffon was Intendant ofthe Jardin du Roi for almost fifty years. Heplayed a major role in making natural history ascience, in terms of both its concepts (e.g., com-parison, analogy) and its spaces (the Jardin duRoi, the Histoire naturelle). So one can onlyregret the lack of museological attention, giventhat the world of objects is fundamental for theconstitution of natural history and even for thephilosophical understanding of nature, as PhillipSloan clearly showed in his edition of RichardOwen’s Hunterian lectures (The Hunterian Lec-tures in Comparative Anatomy, May–June 1837[Natural History Museum Publications, 1992]).Even if Buffon’s Histoire naturelle is not acatalogue of a collection, the difference betweenhis civil servant practice as Intendant and hisphilosophical conception of nature could be in-teresting to point out. Here again I follow Sloan:“If these theoretical debates cannot be reducedto material and institutional differences, the un-derstanding of visual display and the arrange-ment of different collections is not fundamen-tally less important for the interpretations of thedirections these theoretical developments take”(“Le Museum de Paris vient a Londres,” in LeMuseum au premier siecle de son histoire, ed.Claude Blanckaert et al. [Editions du Museumd’Histoire Naturelle, 1997], pp. 607–634).

But these are the comments of an impatientreader after a delicious course in the history ofideas from Buffon’s philosophical perspective.Buffon: Histoire naturelle et philosophie is anexcellent synthesis of fifty years of studies onthe Histoire naturelle, and it is obvious that theauthor could not have dealt with all aspects of

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 4 (2008) 839

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Buffon’s thought. Hoquet’s volume will bril-liantly take its place in the corpus of Buffonstudies, and one can only hope that the Anglo-Saxon readership will soon discover it in a trans-lated version.

CEDRIC CREMIERE

Benjamin J. Kaplan. Divided by Faith: Reli-gious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration inEarly Modern Europe. 415 pp., figs., illus., in-dex. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2007. $29.95 (cloth).

In 1531 one battle between Protestants andCatholics killed a fourth of Zurich’s male pop-ulation. A lasting truce promptly ensued. Thelesson went unheeded by the rest of ChristianEurope. In 1625 the Catholic magistrates of Vi-enna ordered all Protestants to convert or leavethe city. The persecution of French Protestants,culminating in 1685 with the revocation of theEdict of Nantes, is legendary. Protestants had toconvert or go to prison; they were forbidden toleave the kingdom, and in flight they lost allproperty and their older children were forciblyretained. Everywhere, all public religious eventscould spark violence against either persons oricons. When sufficiently provoked, either sidemight disinter heretical corpses, leaving them torot. As Benjamin J. Kaplan observes, “So longas the dominant mode of Christian piety wasconfessional . . . it is no wonder there was reli-gious violence” (p. 75). True to their callings,the clergy uniformly “saw the difference be-tween confessions as a matter of sharp, un-changing, black-and-white contrasts” (p. 265).Given such systemic bigotry, why should histo-rians of early modern science care about thishistory of religious division and intolerance?

Religion is now very much on our intellectualagenda. A generation of historiography has leftus finding little explanatory value in the modelof “the warfare of science with theology” (An-drew Dickson White, A History of the Warfareof Science with Theology [Appleton, 1896], re-printed as recently as 1978). We have resur-rected the religiosity of Robert Boyle, the mil-lenarianism of Isaac Newton, and the desire ofGalileo to use atomism to recast the philosoph-ical foundations of Catholicism. Leibniz workedtirelessly to reunite Christendom, if only towage a united war against the Turks. In short,with the possible exception of Spinoza, partici-pants in natural philosophical conversationswere devout, and nothing in their private orpublic pronouncements suggests that they dis-tanced themselves from the prevailing intoler-

ance of their religious tribe. Those deep com-mitments did not alter their ability to thinkmechanically or experimentally, although con-ceivably the societies and academies organizedaround science did work to break down religiouspreconceptions and prejudices. Science in cer-tain social settings, and especially when pressedinto service by a nonconfessional theism or evenfreethinking, could promote a more cosmopoli-tan affect.

Understandably, Kaplan’s well-written booksees little role for science in the story of intol-erance and occasional accommodation it tells.The book is learned and astute on the way reli-gious intolerance worked, on the role of regionalor national states in reinforcing it, on the flash-points that sparked riots or murder, on the en-suing forced emigrations of Moriscos fromSpain, Socinians from Poland, Jews from theIberian peninsula, Puritans to the New World,and Austrian Protestants to Transylvania. Manyreligious minorities left behind traveled everySabbath to a place, sometimes an open field or,in large cities, a foreign embassy, where theywere free to worship or baptize their children. Atnight, “infidels” like Jews were locked away fortheir own safety in their crowded Venetianghetto, and only in Venice were Muslim mer-chants present in sufficient numbers to warranttheir own residence. A Christian guard pre-vented Christian women or boys from enteringthe building.

In a book that casts its story across Europe,we encounter clandestine practices and sites ofworship, as well as private and occasionallypublic accommodations, documented in theDutch Republic and throughout the Holy RomanEmpire and used by Catholics in Ireland, partic-ularly, and also in England and Scotland. Suchopen secrecy displayed by religious minorities,and the official hypocrisy that accompanied it,prompts Kaplan to remark that this “concessionto popular opinion—the prejudice of the ortho-dox— . . . bears a striking resemblance to . . .‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’” (p. 197). Where a mo-dicum of genuine toleration operated, once per-secuted groups, like the Dutch Mennonites,dwindled in size and religious ardor.

Kaplan is at pains to point out that forms oftoleration could be found in pockets: in mixedmarriages, in friendships across confessionallines, in villages where, for reasons sometimesmysterious, people of different faiths managedto get along. He resists any version of teleologyand casts a cold eye on “the spread of Enlight-enment ideas as an ineluctable process” (p. 344).He recounts the deep pockets of intense faithfound in the so-called age of Enlightenment.

840 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 4 (2008)

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