The art of writing, in metaphysics, consists in making the abstract perceptible and palpable. To make the palpable abstract is its vice and failing. It is the failing of those so wrongly called metaphysicians in this century.

March 22.

Usefulness, truth, justice.—Usefulness comes only from order restored or observed. Like pleasure, it arises from the proper harmony restored between a thing and its relations. Pleasure comes from harmony in the play of movements. Usefulness from the harmony produced by the aptness of applications...

Among the Greeks and the Latins, the word useful had two senses, as it does among us, and because they failed to separate them, their moral philosophy had obscurities that gave rise to long disputes among their philosophers. A preliminary distinction would inevitably have disarmed both parties. Not all would accept that one must always prefer the honorable to the useful. But had they been asked, “May one sometimes prefer profit to justice and the lucrative to the honorable,” none would have dared say yes.

March 27.

Usefulness is so much a property of truth that it surely indicates either its presence or its approach.

March 24. awaiting Mᵉ de Bⁿᵗ on the road.

Our ideas, that is, the images we have formed of qualities, represent them to us and are within us like paintings hung in a study. When it is a matter of judging, that is, of applying qualities to objects, we consult our ideas; inwardly we turn our eyes on these images as if to examine whether they can fit the reality that presents itself. We do what a man would do who held a portrait or a description in his hands and wished to know whether the individual he meets or who is pointed out to him is the one described to him and whom he is charged with seeking.

We have the memory, the recollection of individuals, but we do not have the idea of them. We have the idea of qualities and cannot have the memory of them. Memory is the representation of definite, fixed figures. The idea cannot be...

What our eyes see, our imagination no longer sees. The same things cannot be the object of both our kinds of sight.

March 29.

Throughout our lives we are toward moral things what children are toward physical things, wishing to unite the most enormous disproportions and fit large clothes to small bodies and long shoes to little feet.

March 31.

The style of peoples resembles their clothes. The periods of the Latins were ample and long like their togas. The sentences of the Greeks, of a just measure and resembled ours closely enough. Their clothes were tighter than those of the Latins. Ours are more cut up and cut short than those of the Greeks.

“Effrontery of the eyes... worse than that of the ears.” See Bayle.

A moving, elevated, harmonious, flowing style, suited to the eloquence of the rostrum, was as easy for a Greek or a Roman as a light, polished, witty, lively and brief, playful and flattering style is for a Frenchman. The spirit of private and social life predominates among us, and that of public life predominated among the ancients. From childhood they were taught, and from youth trained, to address the multitude; we are taught and trained to address individuals. They had a language abundant in figures and solemn words; ours abounds in words with two faces and ingenious turns. It was easy for them to make long, grave, and moving speeches, and it is easy for us to go on saying agreeable things. Cicero’s letters are extremely short, and there is very little charm. His orations, on the contrary, offer an inexhaustible source of it, and his mind always shows itself fertile, varied, and never weary in them. It would have been as difficult for Cicero to write a letter like Voltaire as for Voltaire to write a speech like Cicero. It would even have taken great effort for a witty Roman merely to write a letter such as Caraccioli attributes to Clement XIV. No Roman woman—Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, for example—could ever have managed to write and counterfeit a note worthy of Madame de Sévigné. (A flower seller of Athens could almost have written it). Every language, as is very rightly said, has its character, and not only its character but its riches, which, like all others, come from the traffic men have carried on in that language among themselves.

The wit in our works evaporates as it passes through the centuries... Only their true sap and solid substance can last long. One may also say that the salt in our works preserves them, and that wit itself (by pleasing contemporaries) makes the first generations recommend them to the next with greater care, and these in succession grow accustomed to passing them on as well as receiving them. Our books’ past merit gives them, to the very end, a good [beautiful] present.—But the salt must be pure, must be white, and distributed with great intelligence.

The Italian improvisers. By what kind of riches their language supplies so many resources to their fertility.