Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On Voltaire.]

Our mind is not our soul. It is attached to it as our eyes are to our face and our gazes to our eyes. Our mind can work without us, and we can have many thoughts without our soul taking part in them.

This would mean, then, that some already have eyes that will one day be given to all. But those who by then will already have exercised them for a long time... When, then, we have intelligence, we have in this world eyes that would be given to us in the next.

It seems to me that it is not the same with the capacity to love, nor even with the capacity to know.

The latter seems to me to resemble our head, and the other our breast.

But there are certain impulses that come to us from the soul alone. Do all [souls] have the same agility?

There are also certain feelings (for the beautiful, the good, etc.) that come only from our soul. Do all [souls] also have the same delicacy of touch, the same susceptibility?

— More beautiful eyes, more piercing gazes, like beasts with large eyes and flaring sockets. — Winged heads or angels’ heads, which represent pure souls well enough.

Just as from our gazes something forms within us out of which the mind makes thoughts; so, from the thoughts of our mind, something forms, so to speak, on the surface of the soul, out of which the soul can make for itself truths, feelings, objects of contemplation, of love, of fear; — and: that there is no contemplation in which the soul does not take part, though it takes none in mere observations.

And this explains very well why the purely exact sciences, or even the others treated too scholastically, are and always will be, despite the centuries and their fashions, inferior to etc. They are, in a way, and by their very nature, sciences without a soul. — or that have no need of the soul. Now nothing is beautiful but the soul, which was made in the image of the beautiful.

The exclamation “it is beautiful!” and its effect. Of all expressions it is the most indeterminate and the best understood.

Thus the mind is almost to the soul what matter is to the mind.

Of studies in which the soul takes no part.

August 17.

Dyed minds.

Pleasures of reversion. And sounds (of bells, for example) expressing joy or mourning and carrying impressions into the soul less through themselves than through the circumstances to which one first heard them applied. Every song expresses every thing. As does every letter.

Those who were born and have lived blind will have to give no account of the use of their eyes. Nor those...

Contemplation. The soul takes part in it, if only through its pleasure.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-five notes.

T94.Mind renders esprit and soul renders âme throughout this comparison. Gazes retains regards as the activity of the eyes, distinct from the eyes themselves. The startling without us remains.

T95.Intelligence renders avoir de l’esprit as possession of a faculty, in the context of the distinction between mind and soul. The future will be given and conditional would be given are kept distinct. In the final paragraph the latter refers to the capacity to know and the other to the capacity to love.

T354.Clipped initial qui, et, avons, même, and the continuation trine are restored from surviving fragments. The incomplete Mais clause and the printed paroit without circumflex are retained.

T96.The French questions use feminine plural elles after singular âme. English loses the grammatical gender that distinguishes this reference from the masculine impulses and feelings, so the translator supplies [souls] in both questions. The brackets disclose the expansion. Susceptibility retains the capacity to be affected in this context of the beautiful and the good, without reducing it to irritability. The tactile image in delicacy of touch remains.

T97.The surface and making images remain literal. The unusual continuation and: that is retained without inserting a missing claim or instruction. The next paragraph leaves inferior to etc. unfinished; what the sciences are said to be inferior to remains unspecified.

T98.Exact sciences and scholastically retain the explicit terms of the comparison. The lower-case continuation or that have no need of the soul remains, as does the assertion that only the soul is beautiful. The final the beautiful is not replaced by God.

T99.Expressions renders mots as utterances in this reference to the whole exclamation it is beautiful. The contrast is between indeterminacy and being understood, not between poor and correct expression.

T100.Reversion is deliberately retained. The following example suggests pleasure returning through the circumstances associated with a sound; that contextual reading is not substituted as a definition in the text. The fragment And sounds remains without a finite verb. Letter is not expanded to a written message or limited to an alphabetic character.

T101.The interchange of letters and notes, and the printed counts seven and twenty-five, are retained. The French l’écritures has an anomalous final s with a singular article and verb; English writing cannot reproduce that spelling anomaly.