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March […]5.
I persist. The word and idea society are to him what the words people, nation, fatherland, etc., were to the Revolutionaries. And the word constitution too, that is, a half-phantom to which he sacrifices everything. But with him it is the past constitution that is in question, and with the others the constitution to come.
* To ask him: And when there is neither a political constitution nor a religious constitution, to what must one conform?
* Sometimes he extols strength like a true materialist. He makes it an integral part of human perfection. Why then does he not add beauty to it, stronger still than strength?
* There is more will than light here; and what is taken for strength of mind is often only a force of determination. It is above all the latter that makes systematic minds, in the sense that they are invariable, immutable, and I would almost say incurable in their attachment to the systems they have once adopted. A source of evils.
Page 194. “The habit of labor without activity.” Let us observe that certain necessary and excessively hard labors can give it. Such are those of the vine at Villeneuve, where the vine grower’s heavy tools, the stony ground of the vineyards, the carrying of manure on the back along uphill paths, heavy burdens on the shoulders of childhood and the weaker sex, make slowness inevitable in all the operations of this kind of cultivation, except the grape harvest.
March 26.
Page 201. He is right. The employment of male cooks by the great lords has made good female cooks rare among ordinary townspeople.
Page 205. “Spread throughout the kingdom.” Yes, and above all to make him present everywhere and everyone’s neighbor.
Page 241. All this is a fine eulogy of what is no more and a just recommendation of what can no longer be.
* On the ancients. It is an opinion he holds, not as a theorem, but as a corollary and through the force alone of the consequences to be deduced from his system.
* Power and force. The latter must always strike the eyes when one wishes to give the mind an idea of the former. Well seen.
Page 269. This choice of the author’s runs contrary to all the motives he has put forward. The gold ring is not seen. Nothing is very visible except what is in the clothing, as he says farther on, page 27[…].
Page 344. This disfavor cast on all that is merely opinion, in comparison with what is feeling, in all the things of life, could have great effects upon the public.
Page 355. “Contempt,” no; but detachment.
March 27.
(Reread volume 1). Page 72. “God himself (he says) cannot keep a man from being born etc.” That is, from being born a nobleman.
* “As soon as they doubted the existence of God, they doubted, he says, the legitimacy of their prerogatives, and regarded their professions as abuses.” A natural consequence, and so true is it that God, as he says very well, is in essence the social being.
* Indeed, all good laws have only ever been practices, customs reduced to a declaration.
March 28.
For the English, their government is only an object of anxiety and distrust, and not of love and security, of repose.
* In my principles (the author says somewhere), there are no rights, there are only duties. Indeed, the rights of one man have, and can have, as their foundation and support only the duties of another.
* No liberty (he says) without slavery.” That is, according to him, without royal, noble, senatorial, priestly slavery, etc. Mere property owners alone are independent.
* Nota. at page 180, volume 3. Indeed, one is learned through study, a wit through talent.
* Superposition must not be oppression. And of the desire to lower one’s inferior. A statue that sank its base would itself be sunk.
* “Hateful passions (he says) indicate a defect of temperament.” Good.
* English nation, two societies in one.
March 30.
He entered into received ideas with a superior strength.
* Page 109, volume I. He maintains that monarchy tends to make everything eternal, as religion does. Punishments, rewards, etc.
Page 289. “Crusades,” a cause of repose within.
Page 306. Do not abolish the names of the old kingdoms or the old nations when joining them into one.
* “A love arises,” he says. (A general love for every man.)
* “Society (he says elsewhere) must be feeling.” Attachment of subjects to one another; of all to all, of all to one, of one to all.
March […].
“Do not satiate ambition.” That is what we do today, and too early, from childhood.
Page 251. “The spirit of materialism materialized everything, like those waters that petrify everything they touch.” A good and beautiful comparison!
Page 254. He uses the word insuccès. Reflections to make on this subject.
* Somewhere he very aptly calls republican Rome “a monarchy whose king was not seen, or was absent.”
Page 267. “Irresistible.” He is right.
March […].
Nota. J. J.—It is very singular that, on reflection, the voluptuous manner should be precisely his. But voluptuous with that kind of voluptuousness that has passed through the court. His style, whatever has been said of it, is by no means inimitable, for it is natural, and naturally becomes that of the man who is affected as he is.
Something—I do not know what—rusty in the movements, like a door on its hinges where oil must be applied.
March […]6.
The expression “give soul to an instrument.” How one gives it soul.—By experiencing for oneself, through one’s own performance, a rapture that communicates itself etc.—Nothing touches so deeply as what is inward.
In human affairs, there is not a design wherever there is an effect.
The whistles. That is the name Victor gave to toads. Called buffo in Latin, by a name almost like the one the child invented, for it is probably drawn from the animal’s flute-like whistling.
Verses are valued neither by number nor by weight, but by fineness.