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The difference between logical beings and intellectual beings. It is through ignorance of this difference that most authors who concern themselves only with logical beings nevertheless believe themselves metaphysicians and make others believe it. This difference is the basis of the one I was seeking between ideas and thoughts.
The name metaphysics is also used to designate a theory. But a theory is not metaphysics.
August 25.
Ideas never lack words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has reached its final degree of perfection, the word hatches; or, if you will, the idea hatches from the word that presents itself and clothes it.
August 26.
Fontanes says very well of our language “that it is like the mine where gold is found only at certain depths.” He adds that Boileau used to say that “it was fertile in very beautiful words, but that it had to be worked exceedingly hard.”
August 28.
Whatever Locke may say, the word essence (that beautiful word!) is not a word empty of sense, even for us, for our mind.
The essence of a thing is God’s idea of it.
By immense or infinite we mean all the space that still lies beyond those we can imagine, and by essence we mean that pure reality enclosed by all the barks that can represent to us the subject it constitutes, of which it is the soul and principle, which it makes an indestructible, indivisible unity.
Add that it is true we call essence, very improperly, the qualities or properties by which things chiefly make themselves known to us and distinguished by us.
The blind are cheerful because their mind is not distracted from the representation of things that can please them, and because they have still more ideas than we, for our part, have sights.
If a blind man asked me: “What is light?” I would answer: “It is what makes us see. — What is seeing? — It is having an idea of what is before our eyes without needing to think of it.”
The ancients followed this principle and sought grace (that is, good grace) more than strength and exactness: quid deceat, quid non.
August 29.
Sound is not air, sound is articulated air.
August 30.
That Locke has two obscurities in his manner of expression. 1° concerning essences; for, although he distinguishes nominal from real, he often seems to confuse them; 2° concerning ideas, which he sometimes confuses with sensations, as when he says that pain is an idea, and the idea of pain. It is not true that sensation is received only through the idea. Nevertheless they must be distinguished for clarity, and they really are distinct, at least as degrees.
Degrees: 1° existence, 2° impression (through contact or through influence), 3° sensation (or transmission felt), 4° idea or feeling of the sensation, the final degree.
August 31.
Those flashes of wit that lead us into dreadful obscurities.
Thoughts that cannot withstand the test of the open air and evaporate as soon as one carries them out of one’s study. Put a few [of them] to the test of isolation. Take them out of the book where they are: they cannot subsist.
Air is sonorous, and sound is air, air launched, vibrated, configured, articulated.