Work to take the place of virtues for them, and virtues to take the place of work for them.

Law is the declaration of what has seemed most just in the country where it is made, just as the axiom is the declaration of what has seemed most true. Law obliges. Where there is no justice, or at least a strong appearance of justice, there is no law, but there may be a decree. The name of law should be given only to what is fundamental in political or civil conceptions.

Law, the major premise of the syllogism.

December 7.

The sage does not compose. Among his thoughts, he admits few; he chooses the most important, — gives them as he... He does not lose his time in... Triptolemus, when he gave wheat to men, contented himself with sowing it. He left to others the care of grinding it, bolting it, kneading it, making loaves and cakes of it.

Animate bodies gravitating toward the earth. Movement separates them from it, and rest joins them to it again.

Will. Principle of movement. If the thought of movement precedes, there is choice, election. Through will there first occurs a concentration of forces. It is the hand that draws the bow. The explosion follows. Every movement is an explosion. In all there is a release of the string, a cast and whistle of the string, a target well or poorly struck. There is will in all animals, because there is movement in all. Not all have thought, because they have no need of it. Election is indispensable only for morality, and instinct can supply the place of thought in everything except the use of what is mind.

Weights, magnitudes, masses, etc. Paschal himself was mistaken about them.

Every principle of movement is fire. In every movement there is rolling, internal or external rotation.

The colors produced at the edges of clouds by the setting sun. There is nothing earthy there, nothing material, so to speak. Thus our colors are not etc... dusts that cover surfaces etc... Ink is not black, but black is produced in ink.

Gross matter serves only as kernel, ground, weft, subject, (tabula rasa). An infinitely subtle matter does all the rest, the forms, the decorations, the qualities.

There is force and necessity in calling infinite, immense, what it is impossible to comprehend, to contain in one’s thought, because it overflows and exceeds it. Bodies are not in this case. The smallest thought has more vastness, emptiness, capacity than is needed to contain all matter together. And this emptiness, this vastness, this capacity it has precisely because it is not body.

Of (perfect) penetrability. That it is the attribute not of bodies, but of what is incorporeal.

The finite is within the infinite as the full is within the empty, as the earth is within the air.

December 8.

Beyond bodies, beyond worlds, beyond the whole, — beyond and around bodies, beyond and around worlds, beyond and around the whole, there are light and spirit. Without spirit, I mean elementary spirit, everything would be full and nothing penetrable; there would be neither movement, nor circulation, nor life.

It is everywhere and with everything; but beyond the worlds there is only it.

Sunday, December 9.

My old saying, “a leaf that falls moves the world.” And the movements that take place in us, though great, though strong, do not always move us ourselves. Just as in the animal economy there are vessels that absorb, so there might be in nature unknown means of discharge, reservoirs, receptacles of absorption, of cohobition, of annihilation.

December 10.

Accent and mood. Through accent there is unevenness in speaking. There is an angle in roundness. Courtiers accustomed to constraining themselves had no accent. Souls always even, always calm, always elevated, also express their feelings and their thoughts without accent. The more a people is subject to moods, the more lively and abrupt it is, the more it has of what is called accent. Its accent reveals what it has little restraint in. No eminent man has ever kept pure, that is, entire, the accent of his compatriots.