Metaphysics has being above all as its object. The other studies consider only its accidents. Morality directs its destiny. Metaphysics shows us God; morality leads us to him, draws us nearer to him, unites us with him.

July 14.

Of foresight. Whatever may be said, we must regard new existences as something new for God himself: we cannot conceive it otherwise. He sees in a mirror what is to be; he sees face to face what is. He sees (by foresight) in a mirror (that of his foreknowledge) what is to be and of which he has the idea within him. Ordinary mirrors admit only images into themselves; the idea in God precedes the thing; the idea (in the world) follows it. God’s idea is the cause of the thing; the thing in the world is the cause of the image.

“Time, that moving image of motionless eternity.” There is time in eternity itself, but it is not an earthly time, a worldly time. The latter is measured or counted by the movement of the succession of bodies; the former by the affections of minds, the succession of their thoughts, which are their movements. It is a spiritual, incorruptible time that perfects everything and destroys nothing: it completes. Its changes are improvements, developments. It is a time that consumes evil for good and effaces the good with the better. It offers God its spectacles, and will offer them to him forever.

July 15.

Peoples. All their strength is employed for pleasures. Other peoples will come who, having directed all theirs toward work...

July 16.

Jesting has ruined the world and l-t-r-n-.

July 20.

[Delalot?] He was born with scales.

God, space, and time: simple ideas. God as existence, space as extension or measure. Time is movement over space, or the ball on the billiard table, the measurement of time by us or by some other thing whose changes have been measured by us. We are a clock, a watch that marks seconds, through the movements of our pulse.

An agglomeration appears one only because we conceive in it a kind of essence that makes a whole of its parts. Now what we call essence is conceived as something spiritual. For our imagination, the only difference between essence and spirit is that which [is found] between air and smoke.

Through contraries. A need of the mind. As one puts white on black to make it stand out better. Thus God and the Devil, matter and spirit, good and evil, time and eternity, or the moving and the motionless, the variable and the same, the one and the two, the ugly and the beautiful. Like God are: activity that does good, repose after goodness, etc. Like the Devil, or the opposite of God, are: activity that does evil, repose after evil or idleness.

Newspapers and all kinds of books are more dangerous in France than elsewhere because everyone there wants to have wit; and those who have none always suppose that the author of the book or newspaper they are reading has a great deal: so they think or speak like him.

Of pathos independent of art and wholly physical. And of sensations produced by the arts: a coarse means. Or better: Of artists whose only aim, or whose only intended effect, is to produce sensations that are wholly coarse and in which the mind has no part.

God, space, time, unity: simple ideas. Spirit is that which partakes of God.

Matter. And we lend all bodies an essence or a kind of spirit that personifies them, so as to conceive their individuality more easily. We refine them in this way.

Time is movement over space, a ball on a billiard table. To measure it better, we make watches for ourselves out of everything. The movement of our pulse is the secret regulator by which we measure all other successions; and through our pulse we are clocks that mark seconds.

Our stature is the natural measure, the first measure of what we use to measure lengths. Hence the names foot, palm, cubit, fathom or armful.

July […]1.

They sought to stir the world, not to make it wiser.