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Bonnet of Geneva. He is a man who has taken in his doctrine as wool takes in moisture. A kind of mind that absorbs and sweats out the knowledge of others. Réaumur is the Homer of this genre. The others have been only the rhapsodists and gatherers of his scraps.
O my dear friend, they say that just as speech, by forming in the air characters that imitate its figures, acquires some duration and lasts long enough to reach distant ears and be heard by them, so our thoughts, clothing themselves in the body of I know not what vapors, subsist after we have conceived them, breathe out into the air, rise in it, reach the upper region of the atmosphere, and there float, subsisting like the light foams that cover our seas, exposed to the attention of celestial spirits who contemplate their deformity or beauty and thus know all that men plan, imagine, desire, hope, and forge—in a word, what is most inward and most secret. Those frozen words of which our Rabelais is said to have made a tale may help you readily conceive their idea; but this idea, my dear friend, has something I cannot describe that is entelechial and poetically moral, which deserves to be recounted and given attention.
But just as stammered words, which have not been duly formed with all the force of the tongue, make an indistinct noise and cannot be: so, they further say, those of our thoughts to which the will has not contributed and on which it has not impressed its strength have no definite form, produce only smoke, and cannot be seen, any more than they are...
May 15.
Whether the world is six thousand years old or a hundred thousand makes no difference, since only six thousand years are known.
The ideal is what can be represented only by the idea and seen only by the imagination.
The intellectual world is always the same. It [is] as easy to know today as at the beginning, and it was as hidden at the beginning as it is today.
May 16.
Note. That children love weapons and chapels. All men remain children, the wise through wisdom, the others through necessity.
Religion is the only metaphysics that ordinary minds are capable of understanding and adopting.
For children, Catholicism.
May 18.
Truth that obscures other truths cannot be truth.
May 19.
The world was made like a spider’s web. God drew it from his bosom, and his will spun it, unrolled it, and stretched it out. What we call nothingness is his invisible fullness. His power is a ball of thread, but a substantial ball, containing everything, inexhaustible, which unwinds at every instant while always remaining the same, that is, always whole.
May 20.
To create the world, a grain of matter sufficed, for all that we see, this mass that frightens us, is nothing but a grain the Eternal has put to work. Through its ductility, through the hollows it encloses, and the art of the worker who made the work, this grain offers a kind of immensity in the decorations that have emerged from it. A grain of gold will explain to us, etc. (See Nollet on the grain of gold.)
Everything seems full to us; everything is empty, or, to put it better, everything is hollow.—Everything is hollow; even the elements themselves are hollow. God alone is full.—Penetrable bodies are more hollow than the others.