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YEAR 1799
January 3.
Inner sense (moral and intellectual instinct). It is very keen in some men. In others it is drowsing, asleep, blunted, wrapped up, lifeless, or at least so inactive that it seems not to exist.
January 5.
— These quibbles disturb established language and universal ideas.
That there might be only one original element, of which the others would be merely the various sediments. Fire, for example: its first sediment would be air, the sediment of air would be water, the sediment of water would be earth; stones, metals, etc. might be the sediments of earth. Add that it is through the movement and action of the principles that sediments form, that they are more compact than the principles until the hardest themselves dissolve. And other sediments that rise again to the first principles through sublimation—for example, metals—have slags that resemble earth. This earth becomes vapor or water, this water becomes air again, and this air becomes fire again. It is through this circulation that the four great elements are inexhaustible and thus immortal, indestructible.
Our ethics, our physics, and our metaphysics have deceived us.
January 7.
Like Daedalus, I forge myself wings. I assemble them little by little, attaching one feather each day.
January 8.
That our wisdom is the only measure we have by which to judge God’s.
That the sophists said more, and better, than they thought (vid. Arist.) when they maintained that man is (for himself) the measure of all things.
Without piety, old age offends the eyes, infirmities repel every sense, feeblemindedness horrifies the mind, etc. With piety, we see in old age only great age, in infirmities only suffering, in feeblemindedness only illness, and we feel only respect, compassion, and the desire to relieve. All aversion falls so silent before these sights that one may say that, for the pious, all who suffer have an attraction.
January 10.
Theo-sophy. — That what he has made he makes, that what he has moved he moves; that duration is only a successive and continuous renewal of creation. That this hand’s immediate and unceasing application to its work is effortless, is required by the character of its immensity, and that it is [only] through an effect and an abuse of our mind that we attach to it an idea of fatigue and labor that displeases us. That if our wisdom is the only measure with which we can measure God’s, our power and our manner of working are not likewise the measure of his power and the rule by which we can judge his higher operations. That it is from considering his weakness that man finds it beautiful and enviable to impart to his work a movement that his work retains, and to make a thing at a single stroke. That man can have only this power when he is powerful because, obliged by the little space he occupies to live apart from his work and compelled to desire this, he reveals through his assiduity a subjection that burdens him and to which he would not submit if he could escape it. But that, on the contrary, he who, present and sufficient for everything, without changing his action or his place, occupies such a place and is so necessary that, if he withdrew from anything whatever or slowed his natural action in the least, the whole world would collapse—he, I say, has a character of true power such that the mind conceives it fully only by conceiving it in this way.
Note. His action, natural. We act only through effort.
The experience and wisdom of men, of peoples, and of centuries are lost to us if we are resolved to judge everything by our own lights alone. If a book on experience is ever written (as Mr. de P. intended), this should be its moral.
... and are wise men only in dreams.
January 11.
Illusion or play. There is some in everything that pleases.
January 12.
Old men. Severe cold shortens their days.
January 14.
When men have lost this childishness, this disposition of childhood to fear and honor powers that are invisible, when an excessive boldness of mind has put them above all credulity, then they have stepped outside the sphere of accustomed order; they have gone beyond the bounds within which their nature is good; they become wicked.