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The stairway that leads us up to God. What does it matter if it is imaginary, provided we really ascend? What do the workmen who built it matter, or whether it is of marble or wood, brick, stone, or mud? What matters is that it be solid and that, by following it, we arrive in that peace inaccessible to those who do not follow it.
(Tuesday, December 5, 1797, 6 p.m.)
December 8.
Laws. — They are mere signs, often placed in corners where no one can read them. If you want the public to keep off a path, close it with a barrier that stops even the most distracted man at his first step and mechanically. Impossibility keeps people from forbidden things better than prohibition does. But if you lack barriers and a sign is all you have at your disposal, at least put it in a central place, within sight—and what am I saying? at eye level. In a word, a man’s gaze must be unable to go beyond it without being stopped by it. Use visible letters. And that is still not enough: use striking letters, letters that leap to the eye. — And let us say of the style of laws what I have said etc. Let us treat the mind’s attention as sight ought to be treated.
December 6.
Melody too is born of the composite, for it is produced by the harmonious blending of low and high, in accord within the same tone.
December 8.
“Passion makes more beauties than beauty makes passions.” (M. Dubut, quoted by Mme de B.)
To stray not only from one’s subject but from one’s subject matter, and belie one’s role. This is what one would do in moral discourse if one did not commend some virtue to the listeners. It would be to leave one’s pulpit and tear one’s sermon to pieces.
December 10.
Generals who have been victorious must be awarded honors that are eminent, brilliant, solid and lasting, and perpetually renewed, not only out of gratitude and justice but in a spirit of instruction, so that these distinctions may further enhance the opinion held of their merit and make them greater, more worthy of obedience in the eyes of citizens, and more formidable abroad. (See Oriental Tales. The Seven Golden Thrones.)
December 11.
These truths have such great beauty that even the errors that occupy us with them have something ravishing about them. Even the shadows that veil them have something luminous that I cannot name.
December 15.
Forgetting our former existence during our present existence may serve his designs.
December 13.
On utility. For one thing to be useful to another, there must be a real analogy between their two natures (the relations of help and need). These two natures must therefore exist. Likewise, for an opinion to be useful to the mind, its object must exist. (Champs Elisées.)
Alias. Utility presupposes analogy, analogy two relations, and two relations two existences. An idea can be useful to the mind only insofar as there is between the nature of its object and the nature of man a relation of coexistence as real as the relation of application between the idea and the mind. An observation must be made. Ideas have natures as their objects, and judgment has qualities as its objects. This is why there can be true errors, if one may speak so, because one can have a sound idea of an existence and attribute to the being clothed in it... Let us observe, secondly, that the relations presupposed by utility are those of help and need, or those of sensitivity and pleasure. — N.B. A being is to a nature what an individual is to a species.
Decorators.
Beginnings are usually more beautiful than developments. Childhood is more beautiful than maturity. (To seek the reason.) Yet it is not true that the rose is less beautiful than the bud.
Piety. It provides a channel for the stream.