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When children ask for an explanation, and it is given to them but they do not understand it, they are nevertheless content with it and their mind is at rest. And yet what have they learned? They have learned that what they wished no longer to be ignorant of is very difficult to know, and that itself is knowledge. They wait, they are patient, and rightly so.
It is not enough to make what one says understood; one must also make it seen. It must suit memory, intelligence, and imagination equally.
December 12.
Memory. — It is a mirror that retains, and retains forever. Nothing is lost in it, nothing erased. But it tarnishes. One sees nothing in it.
December 13.
J.-J. Rousseau. Of the power of words. Of their warmth. Warm words. That style in which one feels flesh and blood.
...This disposition of mind raises us, detaches us, makes us hover — rounds us, if I may express myself thus. [in the meadow.]
To be eloquent, one must not concern oneself with rigorous exactness. Thus vehement eloquence, applied to philosophy, corrupts it.
December 14.
Applying to the ills of the mind what medicine has taught against the ills of the body: what cannot be cured by iron must be cured by fire; what fire does not cure is incurable.
For him, they say, there is neither before nor after; everything is [ ] and present. But this is ill said, for in morality there are for him fault and repentance, instigation and acquiescence, cause and effect, damage and reparation.
It is with what is smallest in the world, thinnest, least spacious in what the hand of man makes, it is with the point, with the line, with letters, that what is greatest, strongest, most durable, most irresistible in the world is accomplished. It is also through these, by means of a few figures, that what is most difficult and most incontestable in human knowledge is conceived.
December 15.
Is not the remembrance of death fitted to sustain in us the natural compassion we have for pain? — And this death, — and this childhood, etc.
December 17.
Those who have no imagination make fantasies for themselves by combination, as those born blind make representations for themselves by conjecture. But what the latter represent to themselves and what the former persuade themselves of is farther from truth than anything those who see and those who imagine can think, because the others lack the organ fitted to perform the operation in question well.
— A soul had passed that way, — and those features that no pain, no violent affection had ever disfigured...
(3:30 p.m.)