Claude Buffier

After a short stay in Rome, he returned to Paris to the college of the Jesuits, where he spent the rest of his life.

His goal in the Traité des premières vérités (Paris: 1724), his best-known work, was to discover the ultimate principle of knowledge.

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 did 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 gives 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 common 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.