Truth in facts or their epochs is important and deserves the great name of truth only when it can serve to establish or destroy the truths of theory.

July 18.

With this stone in his hand, he asks for glory.

It befits the scholar to be modest; only the wit is permitted to be a little conceited.

To retain with joy the name of an unknown stone is natural. But to repeat it with pride is scarcely forgivable in a child at school.

Sunday, August 23. At Savigni. Reading Kent.

Friday, August […]8.

Great metaphysicians are those who have great or beautiful or just ideas of God, the soul, heaven, the world, knowledge. Great logicians, those who reason well. From which we see that logic is in action or operation; metaphysics, in contemplation, in views and in paintings, if the metaphysician becomes an author.

For a piece of reasoning to be very clear, its premises would have to be two truths perceptible without this reasoning, and the conclusion self-evident.

The metaphysician is an optician who, with the aid of..., renders beings that are invisible, either by giving them a form or by placing invisible spectacles upon our eyes.

[August] 29.

That is to say, all feelings are a kind of chyle; they all result from a processing that has taken place, or from some processed sensation. Our organs are each like a stomach in which the different objects of their operations are digested and from which they are filtered.

Note. It is the spectator who turns.

(...The barbarity of wit.)

One is perpetually tempted to say to him: “Isolate the unknown.” One never sees it.

Thus the idea of resurrection is properly only the idea of awakening applied to that of a deeper, more complete sleep, which we call death.

“Indeed (he says), with the geometer it is the mind that draws lines” etc. That is well said.

Dark and unhappy lovers of a murderous equality.

They seemed to me more beautiful than everything I found beautiful.