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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

April 19.

The mind. Its essence is the same, like God, of whom it is a ray.

April 22.

To return within oneself (we say). When one returns within oneself, one sees God there.

April 23.

Every misplaced snicker comes from smallness of head. And Malebranche has such snickers.

God. All other beings are distinguished by their shadow, but he is distinguished by his light.

Lumine vestiti. We are all and always clothed in God, and invested with his light. We may nevertheless not think of it, just as we may not think of ourselves.

Intellection need not be wholly pure in the book, provided that through the book it becomes wholly pure in the mind.

To conceive these doctrines, it is very true that one must have some experience of oneself, but it is also true that they teach us to give ourselves that experience. Thus they are suited to young people and almost to children. For reality, to consult reason rather than the eyes.

There is no science, they say, and they mean no agreed and general opinion on metaphysics.

April 24.

What one seeks above all in books, without noticing it, is words fitted to express our various thoughts.

[Malebranche.] His inclination to derision. It appears that there was smallness in him. There was in him only a globule of light and clarity.

If one believes him, man would be quite other than God should have made him. Hence his recourse to original sin. — In truth, man is what he had to be to merit or demerit.

In this work there are some strokes, some observations, and some expressions of a very great spiritualist: the rest is only a fabric of abstractions woven with some power, but rather badly.

Thursday, April 26.

This match! (Malebranche). and Fénelon, this candle.

T260.The same remains without a supplied comparison beyond the following like God. The ray image is retained without adding a theory of how individual minds differ.

T463.The source resumes April 19 after the embedded April 24 reading date; no reordering is made.

T261.Tête is retained as head, not silently changed to mind. The snicker and the later globule of light retain the bodily scale of the criticism.

T262.The Latin means clothed in light. The following invested with his light retains the clothing sense of investis, beside being clothed in God.

T263.The condition concerns what the book brings about in the mind. Pure intellection need not already be presented in a wholly pure form in the text.

T264.The doctrines require self-experience but also teach the reader to acquire it. Almost preserves the qualification before children; the final distinction between reason and eyes retains the French infinitive fragment.

T265.Science retains the systematic-knowledge term, which the following clause says is being used for general agreement in metaphysics. The English does not endorse the equivalence as its own definition.

T266.The conditional account is attributed to Malebranche. The expletive ne in que Dieu n’auroit dû does not negate what God should have made; the English preserves the contrast with what man is said to be. Merit and demerit keep the paired moral terms.

T267.Spiritualiste concerns a thinker attentive to spirit and immaterial being here; it is not an anachronistic claim about séances. The woven fabric of abstractions retains the textile image and the simultaneous acknowledgment of power and poor execution.

T1.The contrast is between two small sources of light, continuing the preceding criticism of Malebranche. Match does not specify a modern friction match. The lower-case and after the period follows the source.