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It is very difficult to be wise (through the mind); it is not difficult to be so sometimes and by chance, but to be so assiduously and by choice.
Yes (whatever Condillac may say), we need to have recourse to matter to form an idea of spirit, and need to have recourse to spirit to form an idea of matter. (Vid. Traité des synthèmes, chapter IX, 7th example.)
Yes, with such minds one must attend to their ideas and not their systems, much as a lapidary attends to the quality of pearls or diamonds without concerning himself with the thread or setting used to make them into aigrettes or necklaces placed before his eyes.
November 19.
Whatever they may say: metaphysics can live only on abstractions and metaphors; and metaphor is no less necessary to it than abstraction. Have recourse to abstraction when metaphor fails you, and to metaphor when abstraction is at fault. Seize self-evidence and show it as you can, there is the whole art, all the rules.
In metaphysics, self-evidence, and in morality, goodness. Everything that gives a feeling of the one or the other is good in the one and in the other.
November 22.
Everyone makes, and needs to make, another world for himself than the one he sees.
Leibnitz and Spinosa. — The abstract kind. The first offers its perfection; the other has only its faults.
November 24.
A leaf that trembles (a poplar leaf) and the movement of the hopper.
There is analysis by instinct, analysis by habit, analysis by need, analysis by nature, which the mind performs for its repose and without its own knowledge. There is also analysis by method, analysis to order, analysis by trade, which one performs by art and by method and almost always performs badly.
Imagination is the worker and author of these sorts of representations. Fancy is in us the place and, as it were, the canvas that receives them. Let us therefore give imagination the name of faculty, and fancy (or the place where phantoms are formed) the name of mere capacity.
Condillac. Perception (he says) produces attention. But attention disposes us to perception. One can therefore consider it as existing before perception, and indeed it often does. But they will answer that the first perception preceded the first attention. That matters little, and it will always be true to say that in the fully formed man this can... otherwise.
Condillac. These gentlemen speak only of facts, but there are few in their books.