[Malebranche.] I. But what is the use of seeking an essence for the mind. It is itself essence. It is only essence. One conceives it as an essence. It is an essence or existence. Matter is in some sense something too coarse for the mind. To conceive it, one needs something finer. One can seek an essence for it, that is to say, etc. But for the mind one cannot imagine or suppose within it anything more easily conceived through its temerity than itself.

II. The sleep of the mind or the absence of its thought is conceived as easily as the sleep of the body or the absence of feeling in full life.

III. The will is movement, granted; although it seems to be only a project or decree of movement.

IV. To will is an act; and to think, an occupation.

V. Pain is like a cry of nature seeking to drive away what harms it. All joy is like an ah! of ease.

VI. Sadness (says Malebranche) is always pleasant. He explains it quite well. (Vid. lib. III on the Pure Mind, c. Iᵉʳ.)

VII. (April 20). Could we not understand one another better on this question by saying: matter is not divisible into an infinity of parts one can imagine, but into a multitude of parts whose infinity one can conceive?

VIII. Words in place of pictures or figures are a kind of algebra; algebra is a kind of alphabet. It substitutes the numeral or letter for the thing. For, in geometry, the figure is the thing itself.

IX. Subtlety of images. [It] deceives little, I believe, because it always [has] some little body in which error can be recognized, if it is there. It biases more than it blinds. But that other subtlety (of reasonings or mere thoughts) leaves no hold by which to be undeceived, because it makes one see nothing. Such is Malebranche’s reasoning, that all men and even devils love God because they love the good in general. By reasoning in this way one could [prove] that no honest man has an enemy, because all men love probity in general. In the opinion of Fr. [Malebranche], God is considered less as a being (being of beings!) than as a quality.

X. Here is another, more solid subtlety of the same kind, for it is subtle only through the sublime nature of the objects in question. “The will,” he says, “is essentially mobile (and our mind essentially inconstant), because possession of God (who alone is the good in its entirety) alone can fix the movement.” Until then, he adds, “the will, always parched with a burning thirst, cannot without much pain endure the mind’s stopping for some time at truths (abstract) incapable of making it happy.”

XI. This reason for the mind’s inconstancy is admirab[ly] developed farther down (Vid. chap. IV, page 199, in quarto with double columns, David’s edition, 1721.) And ibid. “Its obstinacy (the mind’s) is as useless to it as its flightiness.”

XII. A mind being, indeed, something finer than an idea, we ought not to need this intermediary to see it. And God alone being probably pure mind, it would very well follow that God alone is purely intelligible or visible without an intermediary; but etc.

XIII. But he has merely substituted ideas for species, that is to say, a kind of more spiritual images for a kind of image that was less so. One can say better still, images that are not images for images that are, or, to speak as he does, thinner beings for beings that were less so. O curas hominum!

XIV. Ah! there is Malebranche making ideas into “real beings” that positively exist. Plato, who has been so much reproached for it, had been nowhere near so bold. What he offered only as a way of explaining, this one affirms as an indubitable truth. And Malebranche is very bold to mock boldnesses. His own are more excessive than all those he censures.

XV. On creation (Pag. 209, quarto edition). Indeed, to create a world from matter or to create matter from nothing is an equally divine act of power.

XVI. “The senses and imagination apply the mind more,” he says. Therefore figures and images. — Nota. On what excludes nothing. That is to say, on what, in such a subject, prevents no mind from imagining in its own way.

XVII. (April 22). Here, however, is a corrective one must admit: “... The ideas of the senses and imagination are distinct (perhaps it would be better to say: are clear-cut) only through their conformity with the ideas of pure intellection.” This is very well observed, and very well said, and very exact. — Add what he adds: “It is... the idea that governs the image.” And “The image of a square, for example, that imagination traces in the brain is accurate and well made only through its conformity with the idea of a square that we conceive by pure intellection.” He should have added that the very figure of the square is accurate only through that, or through that conformity. This is true and very fertile in theoretical, practical, metaphysical, and poetic consequences. — There are admirable things in this man, but those are not what has been quoted from him.

XVIII. Ah! does his power need our help; whether he has made us powerful ourselves once and for all, or makes us so at every instant, what does it matter?

XIX. Pag. 414. He would have our mind perpetually “full of an infinite number of ideas.” (Vid. locum.)

XX. “The soul (he says) sees its sensations without ideas.” (Chap. V, pag. […]14.) Indeed, to feel is to see without ideas.

XXI. There was good taste and some accuracy in all those explanations of the ancients, and always some plausibility. Those of the moderns often resemble only a depth in which nothing can be seen. — “The dependence of minds (he says) on God in all their thoughts.” Ah! whether he has given us everything at once or gives us each thing each time, does he not show his omnipotence equally.

XXII. What he calls “unruly abstractions of our mind.”

XXIII. No one, or almost no one, thinks himself subject to error in his system, I mean in the system he has made for himself.

XXIV. Ha ha! apparently he wanted it to be possible for the ideas he calls things to be neither mind nor body. (However, etc. and vid. pag. 235.)

XXV. When one says 2 and 2 make 4, one means [to say] that 2 is contained 2 times in the idea of 4.

XXVII. [sic.] The example “to change water into wine or wine into water by mixing.” But there is no change, there is only mixture. It is an idea that amuses and deceives to suppose that in every mixture there is transmutation, at least in liquids, for even appearances have not allowed one to suppose it elsewhere.

XXVIII. (April 24.) Pleasure comes from God; and he can place it and make us find it beneath thorns.

XXIX. “One does not annihilate it for the mind,” he says of the mustard seed pounded and annihilated for the eyes. A beautiful expression.

XXX. Aristotle. His books, his terms. They amuse, and amusement is composed of repose and movement. He has terms fitted to express the true, and he has no precise error, which puts a sound mind at ease with him.

XXX. [sic.] God loves them all. Therefore we must love them all. Well seen.

XXXI. One sees what company he lived among, and in these censures he is thinking of his confreres (vid. pag. 277.)

XXXII. Malebranche supposes that all the ills of this world come from our lacking some abstract idea, or from there being in us, in some corner of the mind, an abstract idea that is false, for example this one: “that sensations are in objects,” and that we ourselves produce our ideas.

XXXIII. Most of his principles are true only on the supposition that his systems are the truth. And — must one proportion what one says to men, or require men to proportion themselves to what we say? Must one not take them as they are and speak to them as they are capable of understanding?

XXXIV. With their mathematics one reasons wrongly with exactness as much as one wishes, that is to say, one reasons about nothing, about scholastic beings.

XXXV. He seems to call clear only what lets the mind pass beyond, not what holds it. Thus he would maintain, for example, that one sees glass more clearly than scarlet color on a piece of woolen cloth. Abuse of words and thoughts. (Indeed, purely intellectual thoughts are glazed and airy in some sense, and the others seem to be colored; but what does it matter to their truth if its foundation can subsist without color?)

XXXVI. Thus faith would be to light what hope is to possession. Through the one and through the other one partakes of the one and of the other, without seeing them or without holding them.

XXXVII. He always supposes that it is some false notion, some badly made reasoning, that makes us act badly, and that a few abstract ideas more or less cause all the good or all the evil of this world.