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Erudition. Often redoubles our obscurities because, to the obscurity that comes from knowledge, it adds the obscurities that come from scholars.
January 27.
Knowledge was mad (through emptiness); you have made it stupid (through fullness).
From the word infinite comes a voice that cries: Stop. We act as though it cried: Advance.
The mania for bringing all of nature into play when one writes. Antiquity, astronomy, physics of every class, etc. Voltaire is not free of this ambition in his Essay on History. They are all Pansophic doctors.
January 25.
The great benefit of religion is to keep man from being superstitious.
January 26.
If one breaks in water a vessel full of some liquid, this liquid, which is about to mingle and merge with the water, retains for a time the shape of the vessel that contained it.
Erudition has as many obscurities as metaphysics. Its truths are less certain and, above all, less satisfying. Dupuis’s book proves better than any other the uncertainties of this part of our vain studies. There are many errors in this book, and incontestable proofs that there are many errors in all the others. The memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions alone are irreproachable in this kind, precisely because they contain much research, little system, and almost nothing asserted. Everything is put forward in a wise, moderate tone, and only as probable.
The only good things to seek in erudition are traits: traits of manners, traits of imagination, etc. To wish to recover the whole of these broken antiquities is a useless undertaking. To succeed at it would be a useless success.
I plunged into it, I got wet in it, I drowned in it. One should treat these abysses as the swallow treats the waters. She skims them, she plays over them, she dips into them, but only with her wingtips.
The man of taste would do well to be, in this kind,
The slightest wind that happens To wrinkle the face of the water.
In what men have thought there are only a few summits, a few high and commanding points. The rest is only their ladder, a ladder that time has broken into pieces; and its pieces are lost, annihilated. Even if they were found again, what could one make of them but scaffolding?
Let us search: very well. But let us search only for the best and for what can be found.
It is above all in erudition that half is better than the whole. And the reason is that one can find only halves, fragments, there. To claim to reconstruct and restore so much wreckage is to condemn oneself to waste one’s mind, one’s time, one’s studies, one’s life in the most absorbing of useless pursuits. One finds rest in this trade only when, through sheer labor, one has blinded and deceived oneself to the point of believing one has succeeded. Once one has wholly deluded oneself, one finishes arranging one’s system, displays it, publishes it. One is content, like Dupuis. One imagines one has made books that will bring about an eternal revolution. One dazzles oneself and thinks one sees daylight. That is to say, in this one believes oneself in possession of full daylight precisely when one is blind.
The man who announces an opinion, a discovery that annihilates all the others, has made only a false discovery and has only a mad opinion of no worth. The whole human race cannot have been entirely mistaken, and never was one man right against all.
Among the ancients, the mind lost itself in the heavens. As for us moderns, we go astray close to the ground, lose ourselves in thickets, plunge into mines; our labyrinths are of mud
No people ever worshiped what was visible, and the human mind always sees beyond what is present. Only at the infinite does it stop, take pleasure, rest.
January 27.
On pan-sophy, or the affectation with which one displays in every kind of book a universal knowledge and, above all, our modern opinions in physics, astronomy, etc. Voltaire himself is not exempt: speaking of a city, he readily speaks of the globe, etc.
January 28.
Instead of appraising events, they concern themselves only with embroidering them with wit.
... A field so well sown and so fertile—do you really wish to make a storehouse of it? do you wish to make a pond of this spring?...
... And this great body (the body of the whole) has only movement for its soul. It is the soul of the watch.