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The schools had found the art of entangling with words, and we have the art of entangling with thoughts. They deceived themselves with emptiness and subtleties: we deceive ourselves with fullness and false solidities.
September 2.
What is to be done with this philosophy in which spirituality is banished from systems of the world, and piety from morality! It is to forbid oneself indispensable quantities in a calculation, and integral notions in an enumeration.
September 3.
To hear them, one would think nothing easier than saying what one thinks, and it is not even easy to know exactly what that is.
August 24.
The Professor.
And, speaking of the professor, uniformity in teaching. How necessary.
Nothing is made from nothing. — Yes, says the professor; and that is what proves creation. (Not bad, for him.)
“Preliminary notions,” says the professor. Ah! my friend, the notions are not notions and your definitions define nothing. Not every circumscription is a portrait, not every one is even a figure. All that is known in the world is only the preliminary notions for what you are about to attempt. (These supposed preliminary notions are only an explanation of terms; true preliminary notions are quite another thing.)
II. If your objection does not obscure my idea, what need have I to answer it or dispel it?
(“which formed the memory of mankind” is good.)
August 14.
Descartes prepares all the pieces he intends to put into his system, as a joiner prepares the pieces of wood from which he means to build a wardrobe.
August 15.
They take propositions that are clear in the schools to be clear in the world.
August 14.
[Locke?] How analysis deceives him. It is judging the bundle by the sticks. Synthesis must deceive less. Why.
But the idea of the nest, in the bird, how does it come there?
August 16.
Whether an idea is produced by something or by nothing, provided this nothing is constant, the idea has no less existence and importance.
That we cannot conceive the idea of time without the idea of eternity, nor the idea of place without that of space or infinite extension.
August 19.
“All our knowledge (or our ideas) comes to us from what takes place within us.” There is the whole of Locke’s book.
August 20.
Let us say that the subject is only an assemblage of qualities and substance an assemblage of accidents; and what binds them? the will of God.