[SAVIGNY NOTEBOOK]

That the Christian religion is an essentially learned religion. Why.

July 15, 1801. Sight. At first it seems to us that we see with our eyes as we touch with our hands, by laying on or applying our gaze. We readily picture our looks as long rays coming out of our eyes much as our eyebrows come out of our eyelids. Our eyebrows help give us this imagining, as do the appearances we often have occasion to observe in luminous or burning bodies, such as a candle, the sun, etc., from which, through certain dispositions of our eyes at these moments, we see rays emerge like long, thin, diverging rods of gold. We would thus readily picture our looks going to touch bodies and making us see them too. But on reflection this idea no longer suffices to explain to us the marvel of vision, because it leaves inexplicable circumstances that a little attention soon makes us perceive.

There is an image; it paints itself...

It is the bell that moves, but it is you who ring. It is the sun that illuminates, but it is you who see. The juice is in the meat, but the taste is in you. Fire gives or provides heat, but it is you who feel it.

Harmony is in the one who listens: yes, as an effect; but not as a cause.

One persuades men only of what they want. To dissuade them, therefore, one need only show them that what they actually want is not what they think they want.

July […]7.

“As long as our heart beats (good folk say) — or as long as the soul beats within our body.” This word soul is readily understood.

And first he created the place (or the capacity to contain what he was going to produce afterward). He created heaven and earth, Moses said. — Then he lit it, so that one could move about in it. — He provided for watering by separating the waters from the waters, the fixed waters from the wandering waters, and the light from the heavy. — He sowed it with grain, he planted it and carpeted it. — That is not all. He stocked the clayey water with fish, he populated the air like a dovecote, and made the earth a park that he filled with living beasts. And when he had created, arranged, adorned, provisioned, and completed the place, he put man in it, for the place awaited its master. Finally, like a sage etc., he arranged a marriage for the head of the household, and having given him a helper to bear the cares and pains inseparable from life, he delivered him to his destinies, his duties, his labors. Evil came from our appetites, that is, from matter. It came about through freedom.

It is of the essence of being that there be in it something that is not itself. And why is this of its essence? Because it is of its essence that in the enumeration of its perfections there be that of being active and powerful outside itself. Now, without this condition, it could not act, or at least operate: it would lack an instrument. It needs movement within itself and, outside itself, matter to make a world and not be alone. If for this you wish its will to suffice, so be it. Then, instead of being an offshoot of its force of existence, matter will be a production of its force of will, etc. Under either supposition, the result will be the same, the natures the same, and the effects alike.

In that case, one faculty of my soul speaks to the other and is heard by it, as my mouth sometimes speaks aloud to my hearing when I am alone and is heard by it. And this is well known to schoolchildren who study aloud what they wish to learn so that their lessons enter their memory through two doors.

One needs all the leisure of idleness, time to lose, and study to savor Homer’s beauties. And to understand him one must dream. One needs only a moment, I do not say of attention but of listening, to understand and receive into oneself the beauties of the Bible, beauties that expand or contract in some manner according to the differing capacities of minds, so that they enter the smallest and fill the largest entirely, and the intelligence of the same man, according as it is itself better or less well disposed, receives a fullness of them as soon as it opens an entry to it.

A few wretches made the French people want what they wanted.

Why does a shadow form? Because light is intercepted. How does the image form? Because light is reflected and cannot pass through the body it illuminates. It is therefore through the absence of light that the shadow forms, and through its redoubling (I would say its stopping up again) that the image forms.

I like Leibnitz’s expression when he says that the soul carries the body. And observe that everywhere and in everything, what is subtle carries what is compact; and what is light holds suspended everything that is heavy. Admit it at least in the sense of [— — —] and as the most beautiful conception of the human mind.