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January 29.
That there are innate feelings. That this is admitted. Consequences.
February 18.
... of the whole world. — appears to the eyes of — only a rainbow.
The hardest matter, which we find the darkest, shines for them not merely with seven colors, but with a million. It is for them that all the jets and all the play of light unfold. A diamond lost in a lawn is only a stone to the caterpillar crawling over it, but to us it is a source of brilliant scintillations. It is a heavenly body. It is a star.
So it is that the earth, for example... We are... Spirits are...
On the beauty of matter.
If brilliance seduces us, regularity deceives us too. This happens in reasoning, where the arrangement of the parts often makes up all the force to which we yield despite ourselves. Imagination is the madwoman of the house, but the mind is its doctor. It can be duped by the slightest scientific apparatus, provided this confirms it in what it knows or what it wishes to know.
There is also the Lady of the place, who is reason.
February 20.
All the ardent have something a little mad about them, and all the cold something a little stupid.
In the mind’s conceptions, these philosophers call pure what is stripped of flesh, (deprived of color, without movement and without heat, inanimate). This philosophy is, in its operations, a true chemistry, and what is intellectual, passed thus through the crucible, leaves of itself only a residue that can be named, but cannot paint itself in thought or arouse feeling.
For example, they strip the meaning of the word passion of everything it might offer the mind in movement and heat. They even abstract from morality and tell you (like Descartes) passion is everything new that can arise in a subject already formed. They try to make for themselves an intelligible, clear, exact language by banishing everything that can be sensible, brilliant, material, as geometers offer the mind lines without breadth, points without depth.
And among the body’s actions (if they use them to explain their thoughts), they choose those most properly mechanical, I mean those most free of pain and delectation, such as walking, moving the arm. (Vid. Descartes and Malebranche.) In all this there is a middle way.
Note. Delectation instead of pleasure. In what way and why it is better suited and more usual in their style.
They want objects to paint themselves in their thoughts and their thoughts to paint themselves in their expressions as man is depicted in the engravings of neurology, or like a leaf whose substance insects have devoured and in which only delicate lineaments remain.
Apprehension of the mind. The only way we can communicate with certain truths. Our mind then experiences a kind of feeling like the sensation a great light produces as it falls upon our eyes, closed but capable of seeing.
When I say “matter is an appearance,” I do not mean to dispute its reality, but on the contrary to give a true idea of its real tenuity.
February 22.
Death does not resemble life, nor mechanism movement. If you wish to give an exact and clear idea of man and the world, make them transparent, but do not dissect them.
Descartes depicts man and the world as machines well enough. One could put at the head of his books: “Works of Descartes—or man and the world as machines.”
The violets...
February 27.
I say: God is God, because he does not need to be explained to be conceived. His name is his definition, or at least the only one in which we can enclose him. — The world is a place. It has only this use for us, and in believing that it has no other destination I say: Matter is an appearance, not to dispute its indubitable reality, but to express its real tenuity. The body is the mold of the soul: that, indeed, is its use. Life is a beginning. This means etc.