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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

Saturday, December 22.

As there is warmth in wool because it was born of flesh. Silk comes after it. It too comes from life. And it even has a beauty in which some intelligence is depicted. It was made by design. It is the product of a skill, not acquired, but inborn: an immediate gift of heaven.

Honey. — And how a nest will always be more admirable than a house. Combination (succession in the concept) takes the wonder out of it.

Children are severe. Why.

— Hence that axiom of ancient philosophy. that God alone can make a man continent.

It is childhood that makes life (and above all old age).

Of those who remember their childhood and those who remember only school.

Bad taste is a small thing when it does not lead judgment astray.

Movement is perhaps something still more spiritual than light. For it cannot even be seen. One, light, has intelligence for its source; the other has will as its first point of departure.

Light and movement. — One has intelligence for its source, and from there it flows. The other has will as its first point of departure.

Of light. — The sun is only a focus of it. — Of movement: matter is a channel for it. Suited to transmitting it, matter cannot cause it.

Of movement occasioned by thought: an experience we have at every instant.

When Descartes said: “Give me matter and movement...” It was to say: Give me God and the world. You would have made nothing new with that. For, that supposed, everything is made.

December 23.

When they have troubled the world, other souls must come that are suited to calming it.

These men are therefore only a final disorder suited to ending all the others. These are the return to order; they are new daybreaks.

Until the drop of light I need and await is formed and falls from there.

— If he turns in the same circle? — It is the horizon of his subject. Add: the circle of immensity.

T18.The opening As retains the detached Comme construction. Silk comes after wool in the comparison, then becomes the subject of the repeated It. Industrie is skill or resourceful activity here. Its inborn character is contrasted with acquisition, while the claims about life and heavenly gift remain Joubert’s.

T19.Honey remains a separate nominal opening. The parenthesis glosses combination as succession in the concept. The final it retains the compressed en rather than adding a detailed account of how a house is planned or a nest made.

T20.The source ends Pourquoi with a period. The isolated word remains a reminder or question without its punctuation being silently changed.

T21.Continent is used in the moral sense of self-restraint, especially restraint of sexual appetite. The period after philosophy and the following lower-case that are retained. The source does not give a named author for the axiom.

T290.A printed period after philosophie is followed by lowercase que; the punctuation is retained.

T22.Collège denotes schooling before university in this historical French context. School avoids implying the American higher-education sense of college; the contrast is between childhood remembered broadly and only this part of one’s education.

T23.The two formulations remain in separate paragraphs. Light has intelligence as source, movement has will as its first point of departure. French masculine l’un names light and later shifts to feminine elle; ordinary English it cannot reproduce that grammatical-gender discrepancy.

T24.Foyer is read as a focus of light in the sun, rather than the ultimate source that the preceding paragraph locates in intelligence. Matter is the channel that transmits movement. Its name is repeated in English to distinguish the transmitting matter from movement itself.

T25.The quoted matter and movement are recast by Joubert as God and the world. The passage then turns to direct singular address, You. The conditional would have made and the repeated made retain the claim that nothing new could result once everything is already given.

T26.The opening French elles is feminine and has no explicit antecedent. The next paragraph’s these men and these are not assigned identities by the English. Daybreaks translates point-du-jour; the French noun form stays unchanged after plural nouveaux, a number feature recorded in the French and not reproducible naturally by this English noun.

T27.The Until clause has no governing statement. The drop is formed and falls from there; neither its maker nor the place denoted by there is supplied.

T28.The opening If he turns remains a question-like conditional, followed by a reply. The unspecified he is not identified. The circle of immensity keeps the juxtaposition of a boundary and boundlessness.