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This century of opaque knowledge.
Through movement from high to low, ether becomes fire, fire becomes air, air becomes water, water becomes earth. And through movement from low to high, earth becomes water, water becomes air, air becomes fire, fire becomes ether.
December 2.
...He was scrupulously atheist.
Black people themselves say that good souls are white.
The Neckers. Still more fitted to feel admiration than they were fitted to inspire it.
Pedantry consists in speaking to others of what one knows and what they do not know, to overawe them by it and make a show of it. (Haughtiness, sometimes called pedantry, is something else.)
December 6.
— In this way one disturbs the repose of one’s own mind, and the repose of other minds.
If I am blind in one eye or blond and you know it, will you call that knowledge? and if people say that I have two good eyes and know how to see, and you proclaim the contrary, will you therefore claim to be spreading truth?
There is what is true, and there is truth. Not everything one knows is knowledge. Let us not confuse all these words, nor those for error, which are wrongly applied to everything false. The true and the false bear on facts, the real on existences; knowledge and truth have only essences for their object. To be ignorant of them or to know them is light or obscurity. To misconceive them is darkness, error, false knowledge, and the worst of the mind’s misfortunes and wanderings.
(Distinguish reality from truth as well.)
December 7.
The outpouring after reflection is one of the chief characteristics of the Neckers’ style.
December 9.
The world is in the bosom of God as the earth is in the bosom of the air.
He needs [neither] our prayers nor our penance, but we need them.
Expiation. — Its necessity. — Ceremonial by its nature. Why.
December 12.
Heaven. — Reasoning is banished from it, but not eloquence or poetry. On the contrary, it is their true dwelling place. Every thought there has a radiant beauty, because all have for their object the very essences represented in every mind with perfect exactness and clarity.