BUFFIER, Claude (1661-1737), a writer on grammar and history of considerable note, but more remarkable for his researches in psychology and metaphysics, was born in Poland May 25,1661, of French parents, who returned to their native country shortly after their son’s birth, and settled at Rouen. He was educated at the Jesuits’ college there, and was received into the order at the age of nineteen. Soon after his admission a dispute with the archbishop regarding certain points in theology compelled him to leave Rouen. He went to Rome, but did not long remain there; and on his return to France he retired to the college of the Jesuits at Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, studying and writing, and fulfilling with much success his duties as a college lecturer. He seems indeed to have been an admirable teacher, having, as his works show, a great power of lucid and precise exposition. Buffers object in his Traité des vérités premières, his best known philosophical work, is to discover the ultimate principles upon which all knowledge is based, to lay down “propositions so clear and obvious that they can neither be proved nor refuted by other propositions of greater perspicuity.” The basis of all human knowledge and the foundation of every other truth he finds in the sense we have of our own existence and of what we feel within ourselves. He thus takes as the foundation of his philosophy substantially the same ground as Descartes, cogito ergo sum; but the superstructure is reared on very different principles. Descartes tried to reach a knowledge of the not-self by an a priori or metaphysical proof of the divine existence. Buffer rejects this sort of evidence as useless. I want, he in effect says, to obtain a certain knowledge of what is distinct from myself, ...