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That what makes one soul more delicate than another is its own substance or the character of its envelopes.
July 1.
Firma et constans voluntas. This is the beginning of every definition one can make of virtue.
July 2.
It should not suffice for a man to have wit for him to be offered to the public’s admiration. His mind must also be beautiful, its use well regulated. Hence the usefulness of criticism, journals, academies, etc.
Imagination is part sense and part intelligence. Corporeal things are known through the senses and retained by memory. Memory is a storehouse from which imagination draws.
July 8.
Descartes. No man has been more content with probability as a basis for determining his opinions, provided this probability was founded on reasons of his own.
July 9.
Decently dressed. That is, to have clothing that suggests neither opulence nor poverty, neither studied refinement nor neglect, neither too much nor too little attention to oneself and others; clothing that could go with all the rest in a gathering composed of men of every sort and every condition.
July 11.
It was their throat, rather than their music, that it was important to borrow from the Italians.
A description one can give of my country: one half is worthy of a novel, the other only of a land register.
July 14.
What Berkley said, that “it is impossible to conceive of something that exists outside all understandings” etc. It is the only good thing in his dialogues (in his Hylas.)
Metaphysics is to morals what mathematics is to mechanics, what physics is to medicine, what chemistry is to pharmacy. It must furnish motives through its illuminations, as the others through their theories must furnish us with machines, mixtures, procedures. Unfortunately, until now it has been employed only in the service of its serving maid; that is, in perfecting the language of logic, much as a grammarian can find in the beautiful lines of the highest poetry only rules and examples of constructions.
(Begun July 14, finished July 23.)
July 16.
Where is the world It is in God. God supports it. It is in him and swims in him. And matter? Everything is, properly speaking, only ether, more or less condensed and restrained or more or less free and fluid.
July 17.
Yes. He sees it. But he sees it as a thing to come, not as a thing past or present. Seeing thus is knowing rather than seeing, properly speaking.