October 11.

That everything is done through imperceptibles.

To baptize an opinion. How important.

Monday, October 12.

That it is not true that the statue is in the block (see Malebranche, Boccalini), just as it is not true that a book is in the inkwell. The marble is merely suited to allowing the idea of the statue to be impressed upon it with the aid of the chisel and the notch; and ink has the color and fluidity suitable for bringing to light, by its means, on paper, the thoughts and discourses of which we will compose a book. But neither book nor statue has any existence until we have made it. To speak otherwise is to dupe us while amusing us like children.

To beware of the imagination’s dazzlements. To renounce them, withdraw from them, distrust them.

October 13.

Religion forbids belief beyond what it teaches.

It is said that there is no time for God. That is false, for in his eyes, as in ours, there is a succession of beings. The duration of the father’s existence is not, for him, the time of the son’s existence.

October 14.

Efflorescences occur scarcely anywhere except in those raw materials that form masses through the attraction or impulse of their particles and whose various molecules are endowed, within the earth, with a sort of vegetative force that makes them in some way participants in life. Such are the metals, and among the metals those we call the purest, such as gold, copper, mercury. There is an energy in them from which emanations proceed that make them harmful to us when we fashion them into vessels from which we take our food...

Well! do you not see that to be a great metaphysician the equilibrium of the nerves must necessarily be broken from time to time, but slightly or rarely, otherwise we would be and remain mad. And do you not also see that poetry consists of ignorances put to work by the mind’s skill, and has as its cause the extreme liveliness of a reason extraordinary in its faculty of perception, but incapable of reflection when it operates with all its energy? All great talent comes from an illness, from an ill-established counterweight in which the vital is the weaker and the organic the stronger. Animal illness, but strength and health of mind; disorder in keeping with order, for it comes solely from the fact that, between our two principles, the excellent has predominated. This predominance nevertheless has its rules and measures; and, granting everything, the more must not go as far as the too much. Without some proportion in this disorder there would be ruin, and it would no longer be merely the equilibrium that broke, but the balance.

I say, then, that the poet’s reason is a superior reason, incapable of reflection when he operates. To remain in harmony while exceeding: that is the indispensable condition.

October 15.

This French weather vane whose pivot is Voltaire.

October 16.

The pendulum’s progress. To fulfill one’s task at the point where one is, and to know, when we advance, that we will go backward and, when we go backward, that we will advance again.

October 18.

Kant. — This mind always has some glimmer before its eyes, but never any clarity. “I pride myself (he says somewhere) on not knowing what everyone knows.” He is, moreover, endowed with the faculty of representing his own abstractions to himself for a long time and giving them, in his own eyes, solidity and an almost absolute duration. He has a great power and a great patience of attention. A tenacious mind: this is what has fitted him to establish very well certain general principles of morality. He seems to believe that in our ideas we have something more invariable and more indestructible than in our feelings and even in our natural inclinations. That is why he regards the word duty as so strong and so important a word. All goodness seems soft and almost fluid to him, and every sense of right seems inflexible. Thus he draws his rule from it.

October 21.

To choose as one’s wife only the woman one would choose as a friend if she were a man.