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Logic is to grammar what sense is to sound in words.
August 21.
I should like to know on what grounds one imagines that the microscope and other lenses, which make us see otherwise than our eyes do, really show us objects as they in fact are. May not the appearances produced by these lenses be as deceptive as those produced by the fluids that serve sight within the eye? Because they magnify, do they lie less? Is exaggerating truth?
With Locke’s reasons, one can very well prove to a philosopher or a man accustomed to reflection that we can have as clear an idea of spiritual substances as the one we have of corporeal substances. As for other men, they must be left to their own opinion.
On the difficulties one makes for oneself and the obscurities with which one clouds one’s sight, and how much time it takes to free oneself from them. Hence a half-philosophy deceives, leads astray, etc.
— That mattered to his design, to his project, even, if you will, to his subject; but it mattered little to our curiosity.
August 22.
The word consul (and of the other dignities that have no known correlative indicating the supremacy of those invested with these dignities and independently of all the rest). How convenient for establishing new dominions over men fond of insubordination.
= By correct[ion]. Good! Montesquieu said as much concerning the title of protector that Cromwell took. (Vid. loc.)
“Good and evil (even moral) are (says Locke), as we have shown elsewhere, only pleasure or pain.” One may say of this manner of expression what Seneca said, approximately, of Epicurus’s doctrine: “Truth is on the inside and error on the outside.” Its usefulness is hidden, and its danger leaps to the eye.
It follows at least that, if the idea of vice and virtue [is] variable among men, that of good and bad works, of sin, as Locke says, and of action pleasing to God is less so. Thus all religions have the same morality, while philosophical good and evil, civil vice and virtue, differ in most societies and schools.
August 26.
Vague ideas illuminate the mind, as air illuminates the eyes by letting light pass through... But one must allow oneself a vague idea only of what is vague. All that is vague can be only lightly configured.
August 28.
In Locke. The division of the sciences into physics, morality, and logic. He includes in physics what concerns spirits. But the Latins attached the same sense to it. See Seneca. Logic is the art of regulating our thoughts and their manifestation. Morality is knowledge of the rules to which it matters that we conform our actions and our affections, such important portions of our manner of being, which no philosopher has included (as I do here) in the definition of morality’s essential object. Our affections are to our actions what our ideas are to words. The essential point in morality and in logic is that the former be good.
(Metaphysics is indeed only a kind of transcendent physics.)
October 24.
In seeking truth, one must direct one’s eyes from below upward, and, on the contrary, consider vices and misfortunes from above downward.
October 27.
When? you say. I answer you: — When I have circumscribed my sphere.
October 28.
In hateful characterizations, gentle souls always stop short. They spare and spare themselves.