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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1802

January 1.

The influx of passions. Yet it would be better for them to raise the dikes.

One must obtain forgiveness for one’s piety. On what is the severity of mankind founded in this respect. On the very contentment of those who possess this great good and who deserve to have it disputed if they are unworthy of it.

Then “judgment (says Locke) makes up for knowledge.” (He means intuition.) And that is true. Judgment in this case is like a blind man’s stick.

January 3.

That God has the idea of our ideas. Now, if God has the idea of our ideas, it follows that, etc.

Presumption in favor of the resemblance of our ideas to the object. Our identity with God? But who would dare to speak so? Let us therefore say only: our participation in divine intelligence.

Let us renounce Locke from this day forward and consent never to read what we have not read of him.

And although the human mind should not be fed on dreams, it would still be better nourished by them than it is by herbs and stones (and l[…] gens pasta chimæris.)

January 5.

“He [says Locke] who, with Plato, places beatitude in the knowledge of God will raise his mind to other contemplations than those who do not look beyond this corner of the earth and the perishable things one can possess here.” He adds: “He who lays down as a principle, with Archelaüs, that the just and the unjust, the honorable and the dishonorable, are determined solely by laws and not by nature will doubtless have other measures of good and evil than those who acknowledge that we are subject to obligations prior to all human constitutions.” Add: and of which we carry the notions within us. An opinion that impels the mind to detach itself from its senses and from every false doctrine, to consult only itself. The way Locke made men philosophize destroyed these great maxims he professed. He was the last reasoner to hold in morals the great principles his logic discredited. Locke was imprudent. But he thought only of fencing against the fencers. That is what has ruined wisdom in philosophy.

S1.Source editor’s annotation“Rue du pont, in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.”

T1.The water image links affluence, an influx or flow, to digues, dikes or barriers. Raise follows lever; whether Joubert means building up the barriers or lifting them away is not settled by this isolated fragment. The persons designated by them are not identified.

S2.Source editor’s annotationJanuary 6: “and men forgive it only in imbecility or great misfortunes or great virtues.”

T2.The French ends the apparent question with a period, retained here. Le in le leur dispute refers to the great good, piety; it can mean contesting their possession or claim to it. The January 6 continuation belongs to Beaunier’s apparatus and is not assigned as the main entry’s date.

T3.Imbécilité retains its historical breadth of weakness, including weakness of mind. The term is Joubert’s within Beaunier’s quoted continuation.

T4.Immediately in the Locke passages means without an intervening medium, not merely at once. Joubert glosses knowledge here as intuition; his gloss and judgment remain distinct from the words he quotes.

T5.The opening That and the unfinished it follows that, etc. reproduce Joubert’s fragment and suspended inference.

T6.Gens pasta chimæris means a people fed on chimeras or fantasies. The French words immediately before it are clipped at the right edge of the facsimile: et l[…]. The surviving l is left untranslated rather than expanded into an unidentified word. The bracketed ellipsis marks that physical loss, not a completed reading.

T7.The English translates the French quotations as Joubert prints them; it does not substitute a published English Locke text. Constitutions can mean human arrangements or institutions as well as formal constitutions. The repeated fencing image renders ferrailler contre les ferrailleurs, quarrelsome disputation. [Says Locke] preserves Beaunier’s supplied attribution.