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An Athenian orator said: “Heirs to your fathers’ fortune, be heirs also to their oaths.” Connection between these two things; respect owed to the laws by virtue of which all that one loves has been handed down; indivisibility of benefit and gratitude.
Three things bound the ancients to their native soil: temples, tombs, and ancestors. The two great [bonds] that united them to their government were habit and antiquity. Among the moderns, hope and the love of novelty have changed everything. The ancients said our ancestors; we say posterity. We do not love the fatherland as they did, that is, the country and laws of our fathers; we love rather the laws and country of our children. It is the magic of the future, not that of the past, that beguiles us. But the first is natural, the second artificial.
March 24.
Curiosity, or the desire to know. Its abuses: the laxities it has introduced into that part of morality concerned with the laws of history. Every writer is allowed to say everything only because we wish to know everything. It is less out of love for truth than out of an insatiable curiosity.
Greuze’s Lady of Charity and her daughter. One can plainly see that this is a child she has not made, but received.
Tacitus. What remains of his works was preserved for us by a monastery in Westphalia, where they were discovered around the year [ ] of the century. (See Bayle, article Tacitus). Thus his writings owe their survival to that very Germania where no writing, no letters were known when he took pleasure in describing its climate, history, and customs.
April 1.
The binding recommends a book. A book must call its reader back, as good wine is said to call its drinker back. It can call him back only by its charm. A certain charm must be found even in the most austere writings.
Sensibility overflowing; that is, spilled out of its channel and uncontained by the dikes of reason. Then it floods every object and fills the head as well as the heart.
...And prayer alone can speak worthily of him.
A. But perhaps, my dear friend, the feeling of piety is formed from the same substance that produces the other loves.
B. That may be.
A. It must therefore be exhausted as they are.
B. It is possible.
A. Now, is it not said that sexual indulgence exhausts love?
B. It is true.
A. If, then, we wish to make our citizens pious, we shall take care to make them sexually continent.
B. The inference is sound.
A. We shall work to keep bodies chaste so as to have souls that are religious.
B. That is well said.
A. It is perhaps true that there are men in whom the fluid that makes one love is so abundant that it is as though inexhaustible in them and can suffice for both loves.
B. That could be.
A. But we shall take care not to say so.
B. Why shall we take care not to?
A. Because almost everyone, in a moment of passion, would believe himself endowed with this richness of temperament and, thus deceiving himself, would confidently surrender to sensual pleasures.
B. That might happen.
A. We shall therefore keep silent about this or, if we say it, we shall say something else as well.
B. What else shall we say?
A. We shall say that, in the men I speak of, the abundance nature has placed in them is a luxury and therefore a danger; that if moderation is not necessary to them, neither are its benefits possible for them; that if they are capable of sexual indulgence and piety, they can have only a disordered, interrupted, excessive piety, which can move them only in fits, like a fever.
B. Very well.
A. We shall make clear that, in speaking of piety, we do not mean only that which has the gods for its object, but also that which embraces parents, children, the fatherland, and humankind.
B. So be it.
A. We shall consequently declare such men capable of being very ardent and very restless fathers and sons, citizens and friends, but incapable of consistently showing themselves wise friends, zealous citizens, tender fathers, submissive and respectful sons.
B. As you wish.
A. We shall make other men fear them as vehement and capricious characters on whom one cannot count.
B. I consent.
A. And we shall do nothing to induce anyone to be content with such a temperament if he is endowed with it, or to aspire to it if he does not have it.
B. That will be wise.
A. With this precaution we shall be able to say everything boldly. For do you know (my dear friend) why there are pernicious truths?
B. I do not know whether there are any such.
A. Yes, there are; one cannot deny it, and what makes them so, my dear friend, is that they are alone, that is, they are not offered to the mind with some other truth which, by accompanying them, tempering them, serving as their counterweight and almost as their antidote, could make them very useful. Thus one must tell men one truth only when one can tell them two. And if one finds only one, one must hold it in reserve, shut it within oneself, and await the other truth, its companion, which through its union with this one is to produce usefulness. It is said, my dear friend, that a superior and good intelligence, having imagined wine first, could not bring itself to give the idea of this invention to the men it was to create[,] until it had also imagined the water that would temper the wine. Our prudence lies in imitating the beings we picture as more perfect than ourselves. If, then, we make some discovery, let us communicate it to others only when we can offer them together and at the same instant the water and the wine of truth
(April 1, in the morning, 1797).
Perfection is made up of minutiae. What is ridiculous is to put them out of place, not to use them.
April 2.
Passions are to feelings what rain is to dew, what water is to vapor.
The exclusive study of natural history bends one constantly toward the earth. The mind no longer lifts its eyes.
There are minds that grow better as they grow older: such is that of the poet Le Brun.
The imagination has made more discoveries than the eyes.