Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On Voltaire.]

Chinese. Perhaps their movement resembles immobility too closely.

On respect for things and on too much consideration or a spirit of preservation carried too far.

... They are regarded as mere ideas and pure appearances that inevitably form in the mind and slip into the discourse of those who must treat such matters, but are produced there by our affections more than by our knowledge, and in which there is at most great sincerity, but no exact and rigorous truth.

If we can conceive nothing (not even God) without some prior reason, so that we imagine him as order even before believing in him as power and existence. That is to say, the idea of the rule enters our minds even earlier and more easily than that of the model, and so it is in everything. One can readily imagine the rule without a model, but not the model without the rule. The rule, supposed and held in view, is inseparable from any idea of a model, in whatever it may be. (Tuesday, October 25, midnight.)

October 26.

(Indeed) how many things one says in good faith while discoursing on a subject that one would not think if one confined oneself to knowing it without speaking of it. The mind, grows heated, and its heat produces what it would not draw from its light. Speaking is a source of errors, perhaps also of a few truths. Speech has wings. It carries one where one would not go. The necessity of discoursing, the necessity of saying too much, of superabounding.

Temper mingles with the operations of the mind and introduces itself into our systems of logic. The temper of a discontented mind, too easily crossed. There is temper in tastes, and from there in judgments; I mean at their sources. So that what is most bodily in our moral being mingles even with what is most subtle, most abstract in the intellect.

To discourse is to run, and in running one is carried along; momentum has taken hold.

One can conceive no object without prior possibility, no individual without a prior nature, no existence without a prior existence, nothing individual without a universal idea. The universal idea is the indispensable link by which each thing finds a place in our mind. It is like a first idea that we receive from our mind, from nature, and from God himself, a mathematical, transcendent notion that precedes all instruction, and even all experience.

— Treating these kinds of thoughts as a commodity that finds no sale, a wealth no longer current in commerce.

When you say: God is just, God is good, what are you doing if not one of the highest and boldest operations of the understanding? You compare God to a model, his being to an ideal nature. You attribute to him a perfection that you conceive, in a sense, outside him, so far does the primitive lie, for the mind, outside existence and in essence alone. And this high operation, this operation so bold, the least of minds performs ceaselessly, without effort—what am I saying? Inevitably.

Ideas! Ideas! They come before everything and precede everything in our mind.

It is through one’s temper that one pleases or displeases, and through the core of one’s character that one makes oneself loved or hated.

October […].

Vivacity of the nerves: without vivacity of the blood, displeases. Vivacity of the blood: without vivacity of the mind, displeases. Vivacity of mind united with vivacity of the blood, pleases. Vivacity of the nerves, when it is alone, displeases greatly, and moreover always spoils the others. It partakes of infirmity. Its movements have no roundness. The action that comes from a pinched fiber etc. Something feverish.

October […]0.

Torchbearers (we all are), and we carry a lighted candle within us. Winning the game consists in not letting it go out when we fall and in holding it upright in our heaviest falls.

Children’s reason: take care to keep it upright. Let nothing even make it flicker, let nothing disturb that flame. Some men have it trembling, etc.

T15.The brief collective label and the qualification perhaps are retained. The text supplies neither a particular object of movement nor an explanation of the comparison.

T281.Minor clipped right-edge endings are restored from surviving letters. The opening fragment and subsequent ellipsis remain.

T16.The passage opens with an ellipsis and an unspecified les. No antecedent is supplied from the preceding fragment. Affections retains the broad sense of what affects or moves us, not exclusively fondness.

T17.The initial Si introduces a condition that the printed sentence does not complete with a main clause. Earlier reads plutôt in its temporal comparison with before and more easily. The rule is distinguished from the model throughout; supposed and held in view renders en supposition et en perspective without inventing a particular model. The closing date stays inside the paragraph.

T282.The closing date and time are preserved at their printed location inside the paragraph. The opening Si clause is not completed or converted into an assertion by transcription. The source plutôt is retained, and minor right-edge endings are restored from surviving letters.

T18.The mind’s heat is kept distinct from its light. The comma after mind follows the unusual source punctuation. Discoursing and superabounding preserve the connection between speech, excess, and the next fragment’s wordplay.

T19.Humeur is rendered temper here and in the later contrast with character. Moral being renders le moral as the nonphysical side of a person, not only ethical conduct. Systems of logic makes the plural nos logiques readable without changing it to a single faculty.

T20.The French joins discourir with courir, literally to discourse with to run. The English preserves both actions but cannot reproduce their shared French sound. The momentum remains something already acquired.

T21.The printed text repeats existence. It is not corrected to essence. Link translates lien, and transcendent repeats the word used in the earlier mathematics fragment.

T22.Hors de cours belongs to the fragment’s vocabulary of currency and exchange. Treating remains a participial opening with no supplied subject or completed main clause.

T23.The abstract noun le primitif and the distinction between existence and essence remain explicit. The repeated high and bold descriptions, followed by the self-interruption what am I saying?, are retained.

T24.Vivacity is repeated for nerves, blood, and mind. Roundness preserves rondeur, a bodily or spatial image that is not reduced to ease or smoothness. The pinched fiber and the ending fragment Something feverish remain unexplained.

S1.Source editor’s annotation“Friday the 28th and Saturday the 29th, the fever.”

T25.The larger torch in the compound noun is followed by the smaller candle inside us. The game is left unnamed, and the candle’s upright position is retained through the falls and the following paragraph on children’s reason.