February […]2.

“I was poor, but I was young (Antiphilus says); now I [am] rich, but I am old.” Whoever translated, as [an] anonymous writer did, “I was poor in my youth; now I am [rich] and old” would take from the phrase and the thought all their grace, [all] their form and all their natural simplicity.

Our senses deceive us about bodies; our imagination, about [evils] and goods; our passions, about good and evil; our abstractions, about all things and above all about politics.

The aids given to the mind to make it more attentive, more [far-reaching], this supposed strength and this acquired skill, [equally] deceive it about its nature and its natural powers, a grave and [disastrous] error!

Art teaches one to do without genius (that is, instinct, [inspiration], verve). Look at painters.

February […]4.

To hear Malebranche tell it, we would have within us not only a [master] of morals but a perpetual master of philosophy, a philosophical [conscience]. Our mind would have its remorses; and what is remarkable is that the errors he makes into kinds of sins are all errors of physics.

A work of art must have the appearance not of a reality but of an idea.

And if an idea is always more beautiful than the reality it represents (see above); if an idea has always been the archetype of a reality; if nothing can reach the soul and touch it except through its idea; if everything that is body can enter even our memory only through its idea or its shadow, — what a road spared to art if...!

In painting, the pure idea. In sculpture, a real ground clothed in an idea. In painting, the shadow and the idea; in sculpture, the idea in a body, the idea incorporated and not merely represented. In sculpture the idea in expression is entirely on the surface; in painting it must be in the depth. Beauty is recessed in the latter, in relief in the former.

To make an object more visible, one must illuminate it, color it or sculpt it. This is true of bodies and also true of all things: of all questions, of all feelings, of all ideas. One illuminates an idea by exposing it in its true light or by showing it wholly pure. One colors it with accessory ideas; one sculpts it or molds it through the phrase.

Malebranche. The self-evidence of which he speaks so much must be that of intuition, of the perception of premises, and not of reasoning or conclusion.

Let us distinguish clearly a self-evidence of premises from a self-evidence of conclusion.

Voltaire. This sprite, and his evolutions that sometimes make him seem a grave genius.