Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.
[On movement.]
Sunday, March 2. — More rapid movement supposes more force put into action in the mover. The more rapid a movement is, the more it is movement.
Every movement (whatever it may be) comes from a WILL, even that of a stone that breaks loose and falls from a vault. Every dart launched starts from a string. Every string is the string of a bow, etc.
Everything struck gives and receives, as does everything that strikes; likewise, everything that presses against something or undergoes a pressure... The less receives from the more what it lacks to be equal; in proportion to its mass or the number of its parts, in everything, everything tends toward equilibrium.
Only muscles can bring into existence a movement that did not exist. Everything that has muscles has will. Life and movement are two associated, inseparable ideas. This is because there is no movement that, traced back to its first cause, has not in fact started from some living being and does not remain attached to it as to its source, its principle, its fixed point [...].
That the generation of movement takes place like that of the [...] That in both there is collision, encounter, compression, transmission, admission on one side, loss on the other. The hard body has its vulva closed; the soft body has no walls: it retains nothing. [...]
Small movements, partial movements, go to lose and annihilate themselves in the great ones, and these in the universal, which absorbs them and fills itself with them. In it there are rests that are in it like voids, rests, pores, hollows, and discharges.
March 3, Monday. — Shadow is the manifestation of bodies. Light has God for its principle. Is the S. only a diamond or carbuncle? God, when his splendor is reflected by some body, it is called light. When it is reflected by the mind, it is called intelligence. [...]
March 12. — If the struck body is too hard, there can be no compression or intromission; and there is no generation of movement. Note: The smaller mass, which yields to the other, etc. [...]
March 17. — Muscles, if they were not animated by life and by will. — That a madman has more will than a wise man.
March 18. — That, with regard to movement, every moved body is a thousand-feet or a thousand-rings; that a portion of its parts presses against some point of support while the others go forward, etc. [...]
March 28. — Add. from memory. — That every body goes where one sends it, but not always where one would wish. That every moved body carries a message, in a way. How it fulfills it. That it transmits it or gives an account of it, like a deaf man and like a mute man. Thus what is moved seems to partake not only of what has life, but also of what has intelligence. [...]
April 4. — The odorous parts and the coloring parts. Different (says Nollet, speaking of the first) from the fluid to which they attach themselves. That the odorous and coloring parts can attach themselves to nothing solid except through an initial intervention or mediation of some moisture.
July 26. — Heat (substance) is fire. Cold is absence of fire. Colors are light and are made, like sounds, by a certain play of etc.
Comparison is a kind of conjecture.
Spinning: produced by the fall of air in windmills; by the fall of water in watermills; by the breath, in a word, in every case, in every matter. It is light which, falling upon them to fill them and issuing from them to sprinkle the world, it is, I say, light that makes the stars turn as water and air make mills turn; or as fire makes the suns turn that we see in our fireworks.
March 4.
To doubt — to cause doubt — or to hold in the balance, in suspense. — In this century it is taken to mean: not to believe, to be distrustful, to reject, etc.
Sometimes the will acts without our feeling that it wills or has willed, as intelligence operates without our knowing that we think or have thought.
March […].
What is nearest to our senses is farthest from our soul.
Numbers give no idea of themselves. When we say one, when we say ten, when we say a hundred, we conceive nothing but a relation alone. Arithmetic is a machine with whose help we place, displace, etc. abstractions.
Life for them is a dreary game of chess in which each plays his part strictly and seriously.
March 8.
The earth is in the air, the air is in the ether, the ether is in the heavens, the heavens are in light, light is in God.
Newton called rest a substance (rem prorsus substantialem) to show the great esteem he had for it. Everything else seemed to him only a mode, an accident that was not necessary and was almost indifferent.
To establish as a principle that light comes from God.