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 wordPratique names actual application or conduct; exercice concerns the use that develops a power; effort marks exertion.
- In JoubertThe early organ analogy gives exercise greater mobility, strength and suppleness.
- In this editionThe English translation keeps the speculative bodily account as historical language, not modern physiology.
- A place to beginExercise develops capacities through an organ analogy.
- English renderings
- practice; exercise; effort
Meaning
Pratique names actual application or conduct; exercice concerns the use that develops a power; effort marks exertion. Related as they are, these words do not authorize treating all labor as beneficial.
Use in the book
The early organ analogy gives exercise greater mobility, strength and suppleness. The criticism of a literary, moral and civic mathematics without personal application instead targets abstraction detached from practice. The injunction to investigate mental wear through effort and immoderate flight leaves the cause unexplained. Read together, these witnesses resist both contempt for practice and indiscriminate praise of strain.
Places to read
- I, p. 43, entry 1, ¶3Exercise develops capacities through an organ analogy.
- I, p. 411, entry 4, ¶1Unapplied theory is criticized as detached mathematics.
- II, p. 720, entry 8, ¶1Mental wear prompts an unfinished inquiry into effort.
Translation in this edition
The English translation keeps the speculative bodily account as historical language, not modern physiology. It uses transcendent, not transcendental, where Joubert himself explains the lack of practical application. The modifier immoderate follows flight in the final French; its possible wider scope is not resolved by rewriting the sentence.
Source note
Beaunier 1938, I, pp. 43, 411; II, pp. 720.