Minds that constrain and contradict.

Causes give at once being in act and duration in potency.

January 23.

[Delalot.] “Taste has nothing arbitrary (or exclusive) about it; it does not depend on the influence of climates, it is not attached to any particular degree of elevation above the pole. It is a moral quality found wherever the knowledge of order and propriety shines.” — This knowledge was certainly more perfect in Athens than in Paris. See what public manners required of the young in docility, modesty, etc. A country where conceit was so common and so — tolerated in the first age of life, and perhaps in all the others, is not one where order and propriety have been perfectly known, or at least perfectly established.

And elsewhere, “without cooling the boldnesses of talent”... Cooling boldnesses!... He is full of grammatical improprieties and metaphorical improprieties. I return to what I was saying: this man seems to speak well because he articulates well. In all the words he employs, the sound is clearer than the sense; and everywhere there is an appearance of moral sense that impresses in a thousand ways.

Add. “The people best ordered in its manners, and showing in its customs the most delicate feeling for social proprieties, will indisputably possess the most perfect models of good taste.” Therefore the Chinese; — therefore a mocking and vain people... But besides, does he not see that there is a taste of imitation, a taste of school more than of nation? It is the first that we have, with shifting manners, with inconstant fashions. A people has fixed taste only through effort and the effect of teaching.

Add. A country where youth has always been bold in its manners and old age gallant in its talk, where religion and the world have at all times maintained a constant opposition, where the desire to shine is the motive most in exercise...

“It is one thing to discover with the mind, another to find with the senses...” That is good, but...

January 24.

Water that falls from the sky is more fertile.

What is forcefully launched goes far.

Creation. — God would only have to make a new piece of space impenetrable, give its parts a new configuration, and impress a new motion upon it to make a new being. That is creating.

Beauty is something animal; the beautiful is something celestial.

January 25.

The pious will all be saved.

January 26.

The ugly has become fashionable.

January 29.

Delicious poisons.

Its divinity more than its truth.

Style in which expression grips thought too closely and molds it too much. How.