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March 9.
Descartes’s firecrackers. His physics makes too much noise. Newton’s offers a more silent world, but one too naked, too inanimate.
And nature guides us, now by the forgetting of error, now by the obscuring of truth.
— Chief clerks in the offices of philosophy...
Of all bodies, fire is the most receptive to light; but is it luminous in itself?
Method serves to transmit the form of teaching. It serves for inquiry and research. But it does not serve for knowing. As for the method that may serve to retain and connect our knowledge, each makes his own and fits it to his habits. No method foreign to us can serve us here, unless by chance it fits us exactly or we can fit it to ourselves. Experience makes art, inexperience makes luck. We make discoveries by searching and lucky finds by chance.
One swells one’s voice (says Montaigne). One also swells one’s belief and one’s sincerity.
That in every century, even the most enlightened, there is what may rightly be called “the spirit of the time,” which will not pass into others and which deceives the century in which it lives about the importance and even the truth of most of its prevailing opinions.
March 10.
Descartes. When clarity abandons him, he resorts to plausibilities. This happens too often.
He did not conceive the world in a suitable form. In presenting it to the mind, he fashioned it in a manner more fit to be offered to the eyes than to the imagination. He expressed himself badly, but at bottom did not think badly.
Everything moves on little wheels. For everything moves in some space and consequently in some fluid. Now fluids are all composed of globular particles.
How easy it is to be mistaken in matters so fine!
In what way formulas expressed as figures are harmful in demonstrations. That they arrest, as it were, in the eyes what needs to be introduced into our mind. They slow the leap; and the teacher misses his mark. Convenient for the explainer, whom they relieve. But apt to slacken our attention and send our mind astray.
Those sciences in which the soul takes little or no part.