Tuesday, May 1.

For my part, I would rather believe that God sees bodies as we see them only through the ideas of men, that is to say, only because he sees how we see them, and our error, error for him and truth for us. I say truth for us, for to us they are indeed full, impenetrable, but they are not so for him.

The workman’s finger and eye always resting on his work.

These pure ideas, that is to say, without any admixture of figure and color, as long as general and capable of receiving forms as a space is fitted to become a place, — good. If particular, [they] serve neither for understanding oneself nor for making oneself understood, neither for judging oneself nor for correcting oneself, nor for stopping oneself. Imagination is at least forced to keep closer to reality, and its errors have this added advantage and this lesser danger, that they are more visible.

May 2.

On nudity. — That nature clothes everything or that, at least, she has made nothing naked that is not hideous.

That imagination, when it has been wise and beautiful, has undressed nothing but what is outside the world or below the world without necessity. The Antinous is a slave; the gladiator, etc.

Augustus would never have permitted himself to be represented naked. Antoninus might have permitted it, but from a Stoic’s sentiment.

Below the head, the shoulders, and the chest begins the animal, or that part of the body in which the soul should take no pleasure, Plato would have said.

May […].

[Malebranche.] Vid. pag. 380. The passions personified, that is to say, the furthest point of boldness imagination can reach. And all that for a reasoning.

One must give a soul to matter, but a general soul to matter in general, not particular souls to particular matters, as the school did with substantial forms, plastic forms.

[Malebranche.] Pag. 36. On method. — Here one sees the great cause that determined him to attack imagination. The school’s philosophy seemed to him full of it. But on the contrary. That school had admitted a host of unimaginable beings [...]

(In Malebranche.) On the usefulness of abbreviating one’s ideas and their expressions, so that the mind operates faster and goes farther.

[Malebranche.] Ah! but he could have reproached Descartes as well as Aristotle for having wished to explain everything through the knowledge he derived from the senses. The French philosopher has in fact merely applied the procedures of the arts to those of nature, and all his systems, as Nollet very aptly said, seem to have been forged in artisans’ shops.

May […]3.

It is not only what enlightens the mind that is useful in the search for truth, but also everything that disposes and trains it to enlighten itself, and this is what the explanations of Aristotle and the ancients often do.

If what Aristotle says does not serve to make a man a natural philosopher, it serves at least to make him intelligent. It sharpens the mind, or the instrument of knowledge. (Nota, that Aristotle’s works, except for his works of dialectic, are only collections of the most ingenious philosophical opinions.)

[Malebranche.] With all their fine methods, Descartes and he produced, the first only a very bad physics, and the second only a formless metaphysics, without clarity, without precision, without efficacy.

Malebranche nevertheless admits imagination (in the sciences) “as a faculty necessary to make great progress in them.” But he wishes it to have been regulated by the study of mathematics, which could indeed be very useful if it did not become so dangerous.