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That our eyes are a spyglass, a microscope, — and that touch is another. That without these instruments, which magnify matter for us, it would elude the mind, so little is it before the mind. (Note. That it—touch—makes perfectly sure of nothing except by rounding itself, as in clasping, embracing, holding tight.)
Do you not say that the force of gravitation carries bodies from high to low? — Yes. — And that heavy bodies fall tracing a straight line? — It is true. — Well then, imagine another force, whether simple or compound, that carries bodies into a turn and makes them trace, as they turn, the figure of an egg or an O. Suppose this force inherent and natural to a body, so that it is inseparable from it. — We imagine all that. — In that case you imagine what makes the heavenly bodies roll on an eternal and rapid course, to speak like your poets. A falling stone and a rolling sun present nothing stranger or more [ ] to the mind, one than the other. The heavenly body and the stone are merely moved, one by a motion that brings the moving body nearer the center, and the other by a motion that continually tends to keep it equally near to and equally far from the same point. There is a force of whirling in nature just as there is a force of heaviness. (Or rather, heaviness and lightness...)
A falling stone and a rolling sun offer, in their two motions, two phenomena neither of which is more astonishing than the other. If the one returns in an instant to its immobility, reaching its center by the straightest line, and the other eternally continues and begins its course again, describing its annual circle without any interruption, it is because brevity is attached to the impulse given to the one, and duration to the impulse given to the other.
All bodies are like a watch, and God is like a watchmaker. In his fabrications there are movements of every kind, movements of gravitation, movements of rotation, etc. By placing them in the essence of different bodies as in so many voids and hollows, by enclosing them there as in so many cases, he imparts to some the faculty of acting forever without being wound again, and to others only the faculty of retaining for a short time the impulse given to them.
February 22.
The mind must dwell in a reading to know an author well.
When writing, treat men as children, for they are indeed only big children, lazy, flighty, inattentive, loving only pleasure. To write, then, with charm, with clarity, with brilliance, with skill, and with force, so as to imprint all things so well in their minds that they can no longer... When writing, one must remember that the learned are there, but it is not to them that one must speak.
The Greeks’ Encyclopedia is Aristotle. The Latins’ Encyclopedia is Pliny. But Pliny is only a stall attendant; Aristotle is a proprietor.
Sunday, February 23.
Every moral evil in our affections is an effect of some physical evil. It is rightly called corruption. Lust comes from certain humors erring through excess, through superabundance. Gluttony, from too much heat and tenuity in the salivary or digestive juices. Avarice, from impoverishment in the strength or quantity of our spirits. Envy, from a of [ ] in the part of the blood that makes joy. Idleness, from atony or too little firmness in certain nerves. Anger, from too much mobility or adustion in our bile. Pride, finally, pride itself, which seems of all our vices the most independent of matter, pride comes from too much frothiness and readiness to swell and become excited in that portion of our being that gives us the sense of our own personhood. On this one must observe that the matter from which our faults arise is so delicate that we change and correct it when we oppose its effects. Thus the angry man, for example, if he restrains his outbursts, resists them, and compresses them completely, in time obliges the portion of bile that made him angry to take another course and finally become courage, coolheadedness, firmness. The sensual man likewise, through his continence, makes the superabundance that drew him toward pleasures of a single kind return to the general mass of his humors, and this humor, driven back and mingled again with the others, becomes tenderness, graciousness, sweetness of life and conduct. — D. G.
February 24.
To give him the tithe of time.
Liveliness. The mind must be accustomed to doing without it in its operations. Otherwise it would be inactive too often and too early, for age takes it from us and a thousand setbacks blunt it.
February 25.
Of translation. Its aim is to make known. Its merit is to resemble. Must one translate word for word? Yes; and not only word for word, but also, if it can be done, sound for sound and letter for letter, unless this exactness were to disfigure the features one wishes to reproduce.
Ethics, physics, metaphysics, rhetoric or the art of persuasion. Only in logic and poetics does one not dare guess the rules. One receives them, sometimes even adds to them, but does not invent them.
The mind is a fire of which thought is the flame.
February 27.
Multiply intelligence, which communicates itself like light and fire, to infinity; light a thousand candles at one torch, light a million: its flame remains the same.
His aim, then, can only have been to produce what is best, for the best duration. The best duration is that which has no end.
He first enjoys his operation, then he enjoys his work, whose excellence and goodness make his pleasures. Yes, his pleasures. For, if it is a perfection to have no equals, it is a happiness to have beings like oneself.
Animals. Whether they were made only for man? Whether, for him to live, it was necessary that the air he breathed should have been breathed by them, as it is necessary that plants should have filtered it? For this elaboration... They have lives and not souls, perhaps. Whatever the case, the inner sense whose function is to incline us to believe what we cannot know, so that at least we may have this way of possessing truth, unable to become its masters otherwise; whatever the case, I say, this marvelous sense, which leaves us without light on nothing that matters to us, whether to do or to foresee, this sense, once again, tells us nothing of the lot of other natures and of the death or survival of individuals that are not human. It is within us to speak to us of ourselves. It speaks to us of our soul, of its destiny. It is silent on the destiny of other animate beings.
February 28.
The poor man does not know how to calculate.