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March […].
Alas; all brains are hollow, and every dreamer is a hollow dreamer.
Page 265. “preached only their own thoughts.” Indeed, to succeed, one must preach thoughts fit to become everyone’s.
Page 283. Anything will serve him as a quotation: N.N.N. the abbé Pluquet, the abbé Barruel, even Turpin, etc.
* A fine wit, Calvin! It was Erasmus who was one.—It is fanaticism, but not a fanaticism of will; it is a fanaticism of conviction. A conviction he makes himself for himself.
Page 307. This one, for example, would have very ill grace to reproach Homer for his repetitions.
Page 379. It is indeed true that love joins the voluntary to the forced. Plato would have loved these ideas and these expressions. The author often joins amiable and platonic ideas to the dryly dogmatic, imperious, austere, affirmative, and tyrannical tone of the reasoners of the modern schools.
On this word he always offers almost indecent elaborations... [illegible.]
Page 382. On liberty. He thinks he proves because he proves to himself; but one does not prove by the force of words unless it is at the same time the force of things, or at least the force of one’s thought of things. (Nota. that bᵒ).
His definitions and the things seem to him absolutely identical,
wherever there is consequence, he thinks he finds truth.
He is not punctilious in objections, but in proofs. His propositions are often clearer and truer than his proofs.
One cannot be more a slave than he is to his own ideas, especially in those passages where he speaks of liberty.
He gives his expressions a rigorism of meaning that tyrannizes attention.
Why were they saying he does not know how to write? Certainly he knows how to write, and to write perfectly; but he does not know how to please.
There is a kind of poetics for the art of pleasing while reasoning.
* The question of Catholicism and monarchy has never been explored so deeply.
* Love. If one attends to his explanations, he always seems to speak not of the love that makes one love, but of the love that makes one be in love; which is rather singular in a book and on the part of a man devoted to defending a religion whose character is to be as austere as it is loving.
Page 403. [408!]. The turning of his argument against him would be so easy, yet he exposes himself to it with a truly blind sense of security.
Page 410. And he has just mentioned Italy! (See the passage) Not only does he want very loving men, but men very much in love, and he seems to regard as loving only those who are in love. This doctrine is little in accord with the austerity of the Catholic doctors, or even with the sound physiology of moral man, for experience teaches us that it is repressed loves that make the soul very tender.
Page 410. Go off to China and read Hao-Kiou-Koan; you will see better.
* To say, for example, that all love, even the love of God, necessarily comes about through the action of the senses is to abuse terms. He means through acts or actions; but then the word senses is unsuitable. It would have been better to say through the limbs, which would have been ridiculous, but more exact. The word senses is understood to refer to what is sensual.
Page 419. Society in general (he says) is God, Man, and property. He thus makes property a being, a person. Another abuse of words.
But the abuse is well brought out by what follows: “thus, (he says), a constituted people must have love of God, love of men, and contempt for property.” page 421.
Page 437. One must not “go beyond perfection.”
* Oracles, and relics?
* Very social (he says) “because its duties can be well fulfilled only in society.” Very well observed.
* He repeats, or rather recites, etc. But it seems that, by that very fact, the isolated Catholic, separated from society, would have fewer resources for preserving his religion than the Calvinist, of whom the author himself says that, to practice his own, he needs only God and his own.
* The revolutionaries were reproached for sacrificing citizens to the fatherland; and does this one not sacrifice a little too much the member to the body, the individual to the family, the family to society, etc.?
J. V. for all, but also for the few and for each.
* There is much of the nobleman in all this.
* So much contempt for other religions brings intolerance of them and imperceptibly persecution.—Who would prevent us from seeing in all religions so many circles of unequal size, but concentric?
March 23.
Nota. That whatever we do, it is always one by one that readers understand, admit, or reject our thoughts. The only means of communicating them all together and of arranging them in such a perspective and illuminating them with such a ray of light that every mind can see them all at once in a single glance.
That one must make what one says loved; and that to do so one must arrange it in such a way that one can love it oneself and lay one’s love within it.
* There goes the chime, the word that signals the release, an image that makes thought resound.
* The mind swallows without chewing; it grows fat, it grows heavy, but it is poorly nourished.
* One thinks one hears a clock’s chime repeating at fixed times a tune put into its mechanism.
* One must carefully distinguish the subtlety to which the mind is led by the nature of its subjects from that which it forges for itself, so to speak, through its own smallness.
* All these projects of movement in the imagination have something childish about them; and they must be left to the abbé Lubersac. In resolution and execution they become imposing through solidity, the quality through which alone they can exist.
(Volume 3). He spoke like a nobleman; now like a man ennobled.
Page 34. Subtle minds. There has never been a penetrating mind that was not a subtle mind. And subtleties (not of reasoning, but of thought) are indispensable. You have many of them, sir; but because you use almost material words, you believe you are more solid.
Page 38. Why would God not destroy?
* Indeed, they want to banish emulation, and they offer prizes for the race. Whether the goal is knowledge or a cake, whether one exercises the mind or the legs, there is always competition and consequently emulation.
Page 84. “La Médicis,” “la Maintenon”: these disdainful expressions are surprising in the author.