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To speak with one’s imagination, but think with one’s reason.
July 21.
Truth. Depths in which she is hidden. Penetrating agents, solvents, etc. Let us use even solvents to find her.
Sophronie’s lie (of which Tasso said: “O magnanimous lie! What truth can be equaled to you!”) If she lies, it is for truth, for this truth: “One alone did it, and one alone must perish!” And in the Eastern fables, the courtier’s reply. He says that heaven will be the portion of merciful kings. He too lies, for this truth. And his prince is right when he says to him: “O my friend, it is you who always tell the truth.” They lied, but they enlightened. They lied and did not lead astray. On the contrary, they set right, they brought back.
July 22.
To make oneself ignorant.
July 23.
... and gives such a habit of contentment with oneself that one could no longer do without it for the rest of [one’s] life, so happily had one lived through it.
July 24.
They do not have the style in which one must speak to God.
July 25.
That almost everything we call vices is caused more by superabundance and excess of matter than by scarcity or lack.
Modesty. If our organization lacks it, to place it in the will.
July 29.
Truth. Yes, external and foreign truth, which instructs and does not enlighten. — Through a kind of chemistry. Very well. But it is the chemistry of the stomach, not of alembics, that is necessary to existence.
Fantastic or mythological beings employed by Ossian. They resemble nothingness too much, (like chimeras). They have too little consistency, Fontanes said. How well Fontanes said it!
Effusions of the mind. They take weight and authority from our thoughts. Why. Effusion suits the heart, and the heart alone. Even imagination must speak in separate words and detached figures. It has nothing to pour out. A palette is in its hands; and the mind holds a balance. Thoughts must follow one another; feeling alone must flow.
Men have been exact, penetrating, and profound in the first images they formed of all things. Let us go back to those “prime intenzione.”
We have abuses of logic in etc. and in etc. as insupportable to a sound mind as those of Greek metaphysics in Porphyry or Plotinus. (N, N are the Porphyries and Plotinuses of logic.)