In early youth he had entered into the pleasures and
dissipations of life, and licentious habits seem to have been retained to
the end. But the great blemish in such a mind was his declared
infidelity; it presents one of those exceptions among the persons who
have been devoted to the study of nature; and it is not easy to imagine a
mind apparently with such powers, scarcely acknowledging a Creator, and
when noticed, only by an arraignment for what appeared wanting or
defective in His great works. So openly, indeed, was the freedom of his
religious opinions expressed, that the indignation of the Sorbonne was
provoked. He had to enter into an explanation which he in some way
rendered satisfactory; and while he afterwards attended to the outward
ordinances of religion, he considered them as a system of faith for the
multitude, and regarded those most impolitic who most opposed them."
{168}
This is partly correct and partly not. Buffon was a free-thinker, and as
I have sufficiently explained, a decided opponent of the doctrine that
rudimentary and therefore useless organs were designed by a Creator in
order to serve some useful end throughout all time to the creature in
which they are found.
He was not, surely, to hide the magnificent conceptions which he had been
the first to grasp, from those who were worthy to receive them; on the
other hand he would not tell the uninstructed what they would interpret
as a licence to do whatever they pleased, inasmuch as there was no God.
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