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February 5.
You thus make abstractions play a part in your style that is not theirs.
February 1.
(It has been observed that all Virgil’s lines without exception have 24 time units: note, the dactyl has 4 time units, the spondee 4, etc. It is perhaps [true] that all writers with a remarkable style secretly possess some constant uniformity, which, however, the excellent ones take care to conceal by varying it greatly on the outside.)
As I finish this note, I reflect that all hexameter lines have 24 time units. Thus Virgil’s example does nothing for my proposition. But that proposition is true. It is always a constant and fixed uniformity that gives a definite character to a writer’s style, just as it is always a marked feature, always the same, that gives a man a physiognomy.
Each society brought its god into its union with the other societies; and the great society having adopted them all to satisfy, etc., it came to pass...
Perhaps no man alone imagined several gods at once; but each having admitted his neighbor’s god alongside his own, polytheism established itself.
There were several gods only because there had been several peoples.
February […]1.
A disciple of Locke presses Leibnitz to decide whether a monstrous birth, an animal born of a woman, has or does not have a man’s soul. Leibnitz replies: “Whether it has a rational soul or one that is not, God will not have made it for nothing.” (Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement, quarto, p. 301.) That is beautiful, and all the wiser because it is precisely to fill the void of an indiscreet question with a truth more important than the one that would have been sought and could not have been found, or at least proved.
To remember in this connection Fénelon’s reply to Father Lami on predestination.
Ibid., p. 377. I think, therefore I am. “It may be (says Leibnitz) that a man has never thought of expressly forming this proposition, which is nevertheless innate in him.” Which is nevertheless innate in him is too strong. One can say that there are innate ideas, innate feelings, but not innate actions or propositions.
As for the maxim I think, etc., many men have surely never said to themselves either “I think” or “I am.” Many have lived and thought without expressly reflecting, in isolation, on the existence of their thought and their life.
February 22.
[Locke.] Among men who have some greatness, Leibnitz surpasses him by a whole head.
Imagined harmonies. If they are not a physical fact, they are at least a human fact, and by that very fact a reality.
February 23.
Where is pure poetry, and where is pure eloquence (whether of the forum, of history, or of philosophy)? This is the decisive point in the question of the ancients and the moderns.
Human excellence depends less on the nature of affections than on the manner of being affected by them.
Transparency, the diaphanous, the little substance, the magical; the imitation of the divine that made all things with little and, so to speak, with nothing: there is one of the essential characteristics of poetry.
Our genius has something of the gnome, that of the ancients something of the, etc. We are infernal gods, and they were Olympian. — A celestial fire in the one and an oven fire in the other, beds of embers and not a flame.
... given to the pleasures of the senses, but not made brutish by them. (o.t.h.t.)