Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On movement.]

March 11.

In our dearth of simple ideas, we resort to composite ones, which we forge for ourselves, inculcate in ourselves, give ourselves, and manufacture by artifice. These do not come to us from objects, but from ourselves.

Numbers exist — for they exist in our mind — and it exists.

A knowledge that stops up the mind.

Descartes seems to wish to steal the divinity’s secret, as Prometheus is said to have stolen the fire of heaven from the gods in order to introduce and multiply the arts on earth. This is so true that a hypothesis by whose help one can reach this end seems to him, by his own admission, as useful, as beautiful, and as precious as truth itself. See what he says in his Principles.

Opinions among the learned have acquired greater fixity and uniformity, but no more truth or self-evidence.

Wednesday, March 12.

It took only a grain of matter to create the world. But it took an entire world to create a soul. This is a work that cannot be made with little.

First there must be an envelope of celestial matter to give it form. This envelope must be placed in a thousand others, and these thousand others in a body. This body must be surrounded with air, this air filled with exhalation by means of water, emptied of it by means of fire if it is too full, man given a pedestal. There must be the earth, there must be the sea, there must be the stars, there must be the world. I have said it: “the world is a place.”

But, I shall say to you, if we must judge by extent and dimensions, what is a K[ing] compared with a palace?

Sometimes I lower matter to bring man into relief, sometimes I raise it to raise him higher.

Descartes should have been reproached for his machines, not his chimeras. Too much materiality, not too little, spoiled his physics, and his subtle matter is not subtle enough. It is filings, dust, that he offers the imagination, instead of offering it air, ether.

March 13.

I call a point any place on a surface where a tip as fine and sharp as one can suppose may rest. I call a line any part of a surface on which one can lay a thread, a hair, a stroke with a pen.

Whatever they do and whatever they attempt, they are obliged to suppose an element beyond which they suppose nothing.

Saunderson’s example shows that in this century one can know optics perfectly without having the slightest idea of vision.

T63.Principles translates Joubert’s abbreviated title Principes. The assessment of Descartes’s hypothesis and admission remains Joubert’s statement; no additional quotation or location is supplied.

T64.Give it form takes configurer as giving form to the soul discussed in the preceding paragraph. The successive envelopes, exhalation, and pedestal retain Joubert’s physical account without substituting modern anatomy.

T65.K[ing] parallels the source edition’s R[oi]: the first letter remains outside the brackets and the expanded remainder inside. The capitalization is preserved.

T66.The last him takes le in l’exhausser as referring to man, while it in I raise it refers to matter. The paired lowering and raising, and the image of relief, remain explicit.

T139.The printed à before gâté is retained without grammatical modernization.

T67.Point and tip distinguish the geometrical location from the fine tip that can rest there, corresponding to point and pointe. The pen stroke remains alongside the thread and hair.