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These truths are hidden from us. There is nothing fixed or determinate in them, so that each mind may believe in them in the manner most proportionate to its capacity.
April 24.
Gaiety scatters all thoughts (Voltaire’s gaiety) or plays with them (Plato’s gaiety).
If you want your readers to be mad about a novel’s heroine, take care not to assign her fixed features, so that each may imagine her to his fancy and as he will love her best. (Vid. thought on preceding page [these truths...]).
It matters little to them, provided these opinions offer their calculation and their geometry a board on which their numerals and figures can spread out amply. These figures and numerals seem to them sacred characters that make all doctrines respectable in their eyes.
Evocation of ideas. To evoke one’s ideas. To wait for the ideas to appear.
April 29.
Dupuis (in erudition). He clarifies everything that had remained obscure and obscures what was clear.
An error in metaphysics is at least a production of the mind. But in physics it is never more than an erroneous calculation, a faulty measurement, a misleading indication, a bad survey, a failed operation, a false report. That is why errors in metaphysics can please, while in physics they are detested.
April 28.
Descartes. There are many pegs and holes in his system.
“I have tried to understand myself.” This is a well-known saying of Fontenelle’s. Whoever has no right to take it as an epigraph can only have made a bad book, in logic, in metaphysics, etc.
May 28.
If — the soul is a brightness in which everything paints itself.
From the debris of these first molds, new ones can continually take shape.
May 1.
This is how a watch marks the hours and does not strike them.