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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On movement.]

According to Berkley’s system there would be no distance for a pure intelligence that had the faculty of seeing but not that of touching.

June 3.

Does heat exist (or not) for the thermometer it raises and lowers to degrees at which we no longer feel it? Does light exist or not for the diamond it reduces to powder when brought to a degree of brightness we could not bear?

This gray metaphysics...

What characters written in pale ink are to the eyes.

These temperamental objections to [prayer] deserve punishment, not reputation.

Laws. Empires, societies, overthrow them. The credulous found them. Never has a freethinker been a great legislator.

June 5.

The faults of age.

The judgment of Paris shown on my tapestries...

June 6.

How repentance brings about a restoration...

June 7.

... By annihilating the self.

This fat and plump style.

June 6.

God. We feel him with the soul as we feel air with the body. The inner sense is in our soul what touch is in the animal, and as the seat of the one is in all the flesh, the other has its seat in the whole capacity of intelligent substance.

June 7.

On the self — source of every imperfection.

To compare the innocent, natural soul to a roundness, and what differentiates it to something angular or thorny. There is excursion, deformation in all our v[ic]es. Through repentance we come back in; we reform ourselves. — (To correct, reform, bring back, in pristinum restituere statum. Innocens: that cannot harm, that has nothing that could (prick, pierce) wound.)

Note. — As a color differentiates balls of the same ivory that would otherwise be equal.

S2.Source editor’s annotationJoubert is reading Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision.(Continuation). In the first days of June 1800, Joubert is also reading the Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous. A few notes and extracts.

T181.The separate (Suite). paragraph at the foot of p252 continues this p251 note on Berkeley readings; p252 note1, about uncertainty of attribution, remains a distinct annotation.

T5.The question about light reducing a diamond to powder is retained as stated, without substituting a modern description of heat or combustion.

S1.Source editor’s annotationI do not know whether Berkeley’s philosophy is meant here.

T6.The facsimile reads réputation, reputation, rather than the contextually expected réfutation, refutation. The English retains the anomaly. The edition expands l[a] pr[ière]; English brackets enclose the corresponding phrase prayer because the French article and its letter-level expansions do not correspond directly.

T7.The facsimile reads empires, sociétés. These words remain empires, societies in English, rather than being corrected to impies, the impious. Freethinker renders esprit fort in its religious and philosophical sense.

T183.The source prints empires, sociétés; the unexpected wording is retained after native glyph inspection, not silently changed to impies or a grammatical substitute.

T8.Inner sense renders sens intime. Capacity retains capacité in the comparison with the whole flesh; the translation does not assign the faculty a particular bodily organ.

T9.The Latin in pristinum restituere statum means to restore to the former state. Innocens means harmless or innocent and is explained in the source’s following clause. Excursion retains the going-out image, answered by coming back in and reforming oneself. The brackets in v[ic]es are the source edition’s.