“One must (said the great Ar[nauld]) accustom one’s mind to difficult things.” One must also accustom it to tedious things, so that it finds nothing in life difficult and tedious.

February 10.

T—b—r— [Tiberius] hated above all for his temper and his appearance, even more than for his cruelty.

April 16.

These follies of witty men are at least not the follies of fools. They are the follies of wise men or games with wisdom.

April 18.

With a wisdom too little remarked, Malebranche wishes that, in educating children, one should sometimes use pain as punishment, but never pleasure as reward (only bodily pains and pleasures are in question here). The fear that restrains the soul does not have for it, as he observes, the same disadvantages as the desire that makes it ardent. To make them love duty through the bait of pleasure is to make them sensual and antivirtuous. (See what he says on this subject at the end of book 2 of the Recherche; on imagination, lib. 1ᵉʳ.)

Politics.

Many things have been seen that will never be seen again. The race of man, having come from the womb of inexperience, cannot return to it. In vain does she lift her dress, in vain does laziness push it: it has become too fully formed to fit where it was conceived. God has used means that he has broken in order to employ others.

It is not repose for their mind that they seek, but idleness.

Explaining everything by reasons that can be understood only through an effort of reflection, his philosophy could in no way become popular or customary, enter, in short, into the habitual exchange of thoughts men have with themselves and with one another.

Malebranche. He was endowed (to speak his language) with a disposition to let abstract ideas impress themselves strongly upon his brain, and no man had more of that strong imagination he blames so much; but his own was brought into play only by what was freed from every kind of matter. A visionary of reasoning. Or mathematically visionary. He says there are visionaries of sense and visionaries of understanding. It was his abstractions that deceived him; but he erred through operations proper to his mind and in which he excelled. That is [what] made his errors glorious for him in some sense, because, being as it were natural, they pleased and were bound to please by this quality.

All his explanations are those of a materialist, although all his sentiments and his whole doctrine were entirely opposed to materialism.

Malebranche never supposes there is any difference between souls, he admits one only between brains. The first nevertheless seems to exist and would suffice to explain more things easily than the second.

But what, then, must he have thought of the language of scripture.

On men who are difficult to know and On authors who are difficult to understand.

Thursday, April 19.

Malebranche. One can say of him, speaking his language, that his understanding had wounded his imagination.