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I use their expressions and quote them with pleasure. I like making them say what I think, despite themselves. (It is never anything but our own thought that we perceive, according to Condillac.)
November 13.
On those who have the seven-stringed lyre. 1. God; 2. the stars; 3. the moon; 4. the horizon; 5. the mountains; 6. men; 7. one’s pen and oneself. (On Condillac, the connection of ideas and how it produces imagination. Vid. loc.)
The connection of ideas (they say). The connection etc. But what does it consist in, this connection? I tell you they speak more dryly than metaphysicians with imaginations, and they speak clearly only when they speak like them.
Voltaire. To excite laughter, he puts on the mask.
Good sense is the ease of understanding and penetrating common, usual, easy, known truths etc. Intelligence is promptly conceiving those that are new and the unknown ones, and I would almost say useless ones. (See Condillac, chapter VII, § 98 of his essay.) He speaks very well on this.
November 14.
Thus memory is the mirror in which we see our history; but this mirror has no backing (is not tinned), nor can we see anything in it, unless it is lined with those signs whose tenacity, joined to their materiality, no longer allows everything to pass through etc. and escape.
November 16.
His action and our freedom serve as limits, as it were, to each other. (Life, illness, and death are at his disposal, for they have no relation to our freedom.)
And observe that, for a certain sort of mind, the only way to prove that a thing is not is to prove that it cannot be. The absence of the fact can be made perceptible to them only through the incompatibility it would have with the truth of certain ideas that are their own.
(Applic. —. The excellence of the people and their capacities.)
November 17.
It was from the impossibility of reasoning that the arts, the apologue, etc. were born. (See Condillac, following Warbuston, treatise on hieroglyphs.) And it is again from the inability to reason or the tedium of reasoning ceaselessly that poetry, eloquence, metaphor are born in lively souls. There is certainly a great advantage.
Method. Condillac said better than he thought. Every method is indeed Ariadne’s thread. It follows us, and we do not follow it. One can scarcely use it except on the return, to go back up.
November 18.
Perhaps (and probably) it would be true to say that we conceive only what we can picture to ourselves.
November […]0.
Truth. Surrounded her with figures and colors so that she may be looked at.