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The mind. It wearies and exhausts itself running after glimmers.
June 5.
So that the first bloom of all our delicacies...
June 1.
In Alciphron, p. 320, vol. I. It was not Greece but Greekness (if one may speak thus) that inspired the enthusiasm of those ancient Greeks; and perhaps, if we attended to it, the same would be true of all peoples famous for their love of country. It was love of their country’s manners, temper, laws, and customs that made their patriotism.
Against the desire to speak. The little reasons — roads — in which the mind goes astray.
June 20.
Dream.
To abandon oneself to the ...
In coming, have we done our duty? In settling, do we obey the rule? What prescribes departure and the detour for us (the sign can come only from ...). Of the certain and the uncertain, which should we choose?
Firm and constant will, virtue; that children are capable of it, even to the point of dying for it; but only through honor, or through piety.
July 3.
The English. Good people on their own account, and people without good faith on their country’s. For etc.
That innate feelings are feelings we had before being born; and how they come into us; and that the confused ideas or notions we improperly call innate should be called infused ideas or notions, and why.
July 4.
Descartes admits six primitive passions (namely) wonder, joy, love, desire, sadness, and hatred. He calls them primitive, rightly, for a child’s soul can experience them mechanically before the child is born (as he explains very well in his letter to Mr. Chanut on love; vid. loc. vol. I, quarto, p. 106, letter 35.) He has forgotten impatience in this enumeration, for desire can be followed by it as well as by sadness: impatience being an agitation that follows desire and need, as sadness is a languor that comes from the same cause. The greater or lesser degree of sensitivity and natural vivacity giving us the one rather than the other. This classification of the passions is otherwise excellent, and we must adopt it.
We are born with the dispositions these 7 passions give us, and the greater or lesser strength of one or another depends on what we have experienced before entering the world. On entering it, we bring a constitution and temperaments of humor that make us more or less apt to experience certain feelings. This is aptitude and facility. Finally, as we live, occasions exercise certain dispositions in us to a greater or lesser degree, modify them. It would be possible to determine which temperaments give this or that aptitude and which exercises give this or that modification to these facilities. But that is what I cannot yet say.
Vanity comes from temperament. Dissimulation comes from experience. But vanity is a passion and dissimulation a vice, which must not be confused.
We say of hatred: nourished on gall. How well said! Wonder ravishes. By it we are lifted, suspended. Joy fills. By sadness we are consumed, undermined. Agitated by impatience. Desire has points. Love enjoys.
Sometimes the mother’s health is maintained at the expense of the child’s, and sometimes the child’s health develops at the expense of the mother’s.
Morals as a doctrine, and watching over society’s institutions and habits. Its principal error, or its principal ignorance and its principal fault, consists in allowing to subsist as innocent what is fatal to public morals.
Prayer. Necessary to man and to the philosopher. Do not allow me to believe permitted what is forbidden, or forbidden what is permitted.