From the book
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volumes I–II
Joseph Joubert · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordImpenetrability is a property associated here with material bodies.
- In JoubertThe mathematical body lacks weight and impenetrability, setting it apart from earthly bodies.
- In this editionThe English translation keeps the technical noun and its plural.
- A place to beginThe property is excluded from a mathematical body.
- English renderings
- impenetrability; impenetrabilities
Meaning
Impenetrability is a property associated here with material bodies. It is distinct from intellectual obscurity or an inability to understand.
Use in the book
The mathematical body lacks weight and impenetrability, setting it apart from earthly bodies. The isolated suggestion that impenetrability can condense as color deepens compares degree in one property with degree in another without supplying a mechanism. The late plural “impenetrabilities” enters the imposing scientific vocabulary that the hollow-grain image seeks to diminish. These are different argumentative uses rather than an established physical law.
Places to read
- I, p. 446, entry 1, ¶2The property is excluded from a mathematical body.
- I, p. 362, entry begun p. 361, no. 9, ¶3Condensation is compared with deepening color.
- II, p. 906, entry 4, ¶1The unusual plural appears in an interrogation of matter’s apparent power.
Translation in this edition
The English translation keeps the technical noun and its plural. In the late passage the qualification “[to] itself” is bracketed in English; the lexicon does not erase that source-related caution.
Penetrability
French: pénétrabilité.
The short fragment assigns perfect penetrability to what is incorporeal, explicitly not to bodies. The English translation retains both the parenthetic perfect and the contrast. This is not a claim that ordinary porous bodies are incorporeal: the perfect degree is part of the statement, and the fragment supplies no completed theory of how incorporeal things interpenetrate.
Places to read: I, p. 183, entry 6, ¶1.
Source note
Beaunier 1938, I, pp. 183, 362, 446; II, pp. 906.