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Man's nature is not always to advance; it has its advances and retreats.
Fever has its cold and hot fits; and the cold proves as well as the hot the greatness of the fire of fever.
The discoveries of men from age to age turn out the same. The kindness and the malice of the world in general are the same. Plerumque gratæ principibus vices.[133]
Continuous eloquence wearies.
Princes and kings sometimes play. They are not always on their thrones. They weary there. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.
Nature acts by progress, itus et reditus. It goes and returns, then advances further, then twice as much backwards, then more forward than ever, etc.
The tide of the sea behaves in the same manner; and so apparently does the sun in its course.
The nourishment of the body is little by little. Fullness of nourishment and smallness of substance.
When we would pursue virtues to their extremes on either side, vices present themselves, which insinuate themselves insensibly there, in their insensible journey towards the infinitely little:[Pg 99] and vices present themselves in a crowd towards the infinitely great, so that we lose ourselves in them, and no longer see virtues. We find fault with perfection itself.
Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.[134]
We do not sustain ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by the balancing of two opposed vices, just as we remain upright amidst two contrary gales. Remove one of the vices, and we fall into the other.
What the Stoics propose is so difficult and foolish!
The Stoics lay down that all those who are not at the high degree of wisdom are equally foolish and vicious, as those who are two inches under water.
The sovereign good. Dispute about the sovereign good.—Ut sis contentus temetipso et ex te nascentibus bonis.[135] There is a contradiction, for in the end they advise suicide. Oh! What a happy life, from which we are to free ourselves as from the plague!
Ex senatus-consultis et plebiscitis ...
To ask like passages.
Ex senatus-consultis et plebiscitis scelera exercentur. Sen. 588.[136]
Nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. Divin.[137]
Quibusdam destinatis sententiis consecrati quæ non probant coguntur defendere. Cic.[138]
Ut omnium rerum sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus. Senec.[139]
Id maxime quemque decet, quod est cujusque suum maxime.[140]
Hos natura modos primum dedit.[141] Georg.
Paucis opus est litteris ad bonam mentem.[Pg 100][142]
Si quando turpe non sit, tamen non est non turpe quum id a multitudine laudetur.
Mihi sic usus est, tibi ut opus est facto, fac.[143] Ter.
Rarum est enim ut satis se quisque vereatur.[144]
Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes deos.[145]
Nihil turpius quam cognitioni assertionem præcurrere. Cic.[146]
Nec me pudet, ut istos, fateri nescire quid nesciam.[147]
Melius non incipient.[148]
Thought.—All the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects!
But what is this thought? How foolish it is!
The mind of this sovereign judge of the world is not so independent that it is not liable to be disturbed by the first din about it. The noise of a cannon is not necessary to hinder its thoughts; it needs only the creaking of a weathercock or a pulley. Do not wonder if at present it does not reason well; a fly is buzzing in its ears; that is enough to render it incapable of good judgment. If you wish it to be able to reach the truth, chase away that animal which holds its reason in check and disturbs that powerful intellect which rules towns and kingdoms. Here is a comical god! O ridicolosissimo eroe!
The power of flies; they win battles,[149] hinder our soul from acting, eat our body.
When it is said that heat is only the motions of certain molecules, and light the conatus recedendi which we feel,[150] it astonishes us. What! Is pleasure only the ballet of our spirits? We have conceived so different an idea of it! And these sensations seem so removed from those others which we say are the same as those with which we compare them! The sensation[Pg 101] from the fire, that warmth which affects us in a manner wholly different from touch, the reception of sound and light, all this appears to us mysterious, and yet it is material like the blow of a stone. It is true that the smallness of the spirits which enter into the pores touches other nerves, but there are always some nerves touched.
Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason.
[Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.
A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it down. I write instead, that it has escaped me.]
[When I was small, I hugged my book; and because it sometimes happened to me to ... in believing I hugged it, I doubted....]
In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.
