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March 10.
They do not know how to apply names to things.
Faulty distribution of human affections.
When one accustoms one’s heart to love kinds that exist only for the mind, one is attached only to abstractions and readily sacrifices realities to them. Or, when one loves all men en masse, one has no affection left to distribute to them individually. One has spent all one’s benevolence on the whole. Individuals present themselves too much. Moreover, these philosophical affections, which one cannot feel without effort, by that very fact ruin and dry up our capacity to love.
One must keep one’s feelings close to one’s heart.
What the knot is in the difficulty.
It must indeed be true, for we would not have imagined it.
March 11.
Descartes. Is the first to have introduced into human society distrust of accepted and uncontested opinions.
March 12, 1797.
2nd Sun. of Lent.—In the dark room.
March 12.
Forgetfulness of the things of earth, intentness on the things of heaven, freedom from all harsh ardor and all disquiet, from all care and all worry, from all disturbance and all effort, the fullness of life without any agitation. The delights of feeling without the labor of thought. The raptures of ecstasy without the preparations of meditation. In a word, the felicity of pure spirituality in the midst of the world and amid the tumult of the senses. It is only the happiness of an hour, of a minute, of an instant. But this instant, this minute of piety spreads sweetness over our months and our years.
The soul must breathe, after all. This indefiniteness is its air, its space. Here it moves at ease. A single draft (haustus) of this element is enough to refresh within it the source of its well-being, which is the effect of its temperances.
There is an indefiniteness that is mere emptiness, and another that is spaciousness.
Inner sense.—Is a real sense, a true faculty. In enumerating the constituent parts of which the human whole is composed, whoever fails to take account of this one has made, and could only have made, an incomplete reckoning.
It is our inward touch, distinct from all our other senses. Like them, it has its properties and its purpose.
Its operations are as indispensable as theirs. Whoever leaves it inactive harms himself and makes his own mind incapable of meeting the demands of the most important intellectual labors.
March 16.
There are lazy heads and there are lazy bodies, indolences and slownesses of movement, inabilities to take care, to trouble oneself, to attend, to tend, and failures of activity.
There are languors of conduct that come from the blood, the nerves, the muscles, the flesh. Others that come from the spirits. In some, the tendons are too slack; in others, the head and heart are too little animated. This accounts for the differences between the dawdler and the idler.
Touch is to the inner sense as a stick at the end of a hand. There are a thousand objects our solid faculties cannot discern.
March 18.
Speaking ill relieves malice.