July 19–25.

(Tuesday, July 19.) Every body has its fore-body, every sense has its fore-sense; tact is that of touch, modesty that of the soul.

Every body has its fore-body and every sense its fore-sense, through a secret extension of substance or quality formed by the emissions of quality or substance that issue unceasingly outside it. These emissions are more lively if the bodies are more animated or if the senses are more exquisite. Around the points or large bodies that produce them they form a circle, a sphere, an orbit that gives them more extent than they have through the filled space within which they limit themselves (keeping their dimensions). Through this secret extension they are reached and they reach without touching or being touched. Though they are distant, it brings them near, and makes them present where they are not. Let us picture a torch which, carrying the tips of its rays in every direction, suddenly perceives far away an object that could extinguish it and draws its light back into itself. Let us imagine a point which, moving through the air, senses the approach of a body that would be capable of breaking it — and would take another path...

Our intelligence radiates and our sensibility has a vapor around it. Man, finally, has his atmosphere.

If the sun touches the earth only with the very tips of its rays, it receives no stain from it. And if our eye touches a hard body, a pointed body, even a sword, only with the very tips of its gazes, it receives no wound from it.

— The skin, the outer skin and the flesh...

— Two bodies can be in contact without being near each other, luminous ones through their light, and opaque ones through their shadow. They also make themselves felt in advance through the heat or cold that precedes them as it issues from them. Shadow itself has its penumbra, burning coal its brightness.

Everything is clothed and protected in advance, and thereby increased both in volume and in power.

(July 20.) Beyond the filled space where they themselves end, not solid dimensions...

— mingled with the air that embraces it or presses it, molds it, delineates it, and clasps it (or encloses it)...

There are dry emanations and moist emanations.

(July 23.) The sun boils; and from this movement of its parts there comes a dust that we call light (a transparent medium without which one can see nothing).

The open rose is also boiling, and through this boiling there comes from its breast a smoke that we call its perfume. The bell, the drum, the clarion, the flute and the lyre also have their boilings when they are set in play; but this boiling, from which only a movement emerges, is called vibration. From this vibration, communicated to the air and modulated in various ways, sound is produced, which, in its march or its course, proceeds by waves or by undulations.

Through tact one touches the shadow or the fore-body, using only the fore-sense. In a foretaste it is ordinarily the idea, rather than the vapor of the food, that sets our appetite in motion.

The vapor of flesh, raw and freshly killed, nourishes. The emanations of robust animals strengthen. What has much life spreads much of it around itself. And what has much soul communicates it to everything susceptible to it within its sphere.

Sounds, smells, light, flavors and the action of bodies or tactile objects always cause some emotion or some movement in us, and consequently some state. Add that all heat increases our evaporations. Much life and much soul increase them still more and make them perpetual.

If extreme expansibility is joined to extreme susceptibility (or susceptivity), there is no lasting loss, because perpetual repairs take place. Thus the heavenly bodies empty and refill themselves unceasingly, nourish and are nourished. — Through divine irradiation.

(It seems that we inhabit the darkest or most nebulous point of the world and that the earth is indeed a den or the cavern of the universe. Because it is the point where God’s radiance makes itself least felt and least seen.)

— Through a secret emission of substance or quality that makes them in reality extended beyond themselves and present where they are not. So that they are in reciprocal communication with a thousand objects they do not know and that do not know them.

The boa and its power of suction. What comes out of its mouth entwines. Its breath is a whirlwind. It forms in the air a gulf, a whirling atmosphere that stuns, lulls to sleep, poisons and draws toward itself, against its will, the animal that would wish to flee it: a horrible phenomenon, useful to our explanations. It breathes in a corkscrew, in a spiral, in a circle, in a whirlwind, in a funnel. (The whirlwind of the Latins.)

(July 24.) Through the infinite divisibility of matter.

Sometimes by contact; sometimes by application: application is necessary to the less sensitive. The application of body to body, or of sense to object: the latter can take place at some distance.

(July 25.) All brilliance comes from a reflection.