Autobiographical, Scientific, Religious, Moral, and Literary Writings

Notes for the Reveries

50 Notes for the Reveries1 1 In order to fulfill the title of this collection well I should have begun sixty years ago: for my entire life has hardly been anything but a long reverie divided into chapters by my walks each day. I begin it today, even though belatedly, because there is nothing better left for me to do in this world. I already feel my imagination becoming frozen, all my faculties becoming weaker. I expect to see my reveries becoming colder from day to day until the boredom of writing them deprives me of the courage to do so; thus if I continue it, my book must naturally end when I approach the end of my life. 2 It is true that the most impassive man is subjected by his body and his senses to impressions of pleasure and pain and to their eVects. But, by themselves, these purely physical impressions are only sensations. They can only produce passions, even sometimes virtues, either when the deep and lasting impression is prolonged in the soul and outlives the sensation; or when the will, moved by other motives, resists the pleasure or consents to the pain; also it is necessary that this will always remain prevalent in the act2 for if the sensation, being more powerful, finally uproots the consent, all the morality of the resistance vanishes and the act becomes again, both by itself and by its eVects, absolutely the same as if it had been fully consented to. This rigor appears harsh but also is it not, then, from it that virtue bears such a sublime name? If the victory costs nothing what crown would it deserve? 3 Happiness is too constant a condition and man too mutable a being for the one to suit the other. *** Solon cited to Croesus the example of three happy men, less because of the happiness of their life than from the gentleness of their death, and did not at all grant that he was a happy man as long as he was still alive.3 Experience proved that he was right. I add that if there is some truly happy man on the earth, he will not be cited as an example of it for no one other than himself knows anything about it. A continuous movement that I perceive informs me that I exist for it is certain the sole aVection that I experience then is the weak sensation of a slight, even, and monotonous noise. What, then, is it that I enjoy: myself. From . . . 4 It is true that I do not do anything on the earth; but when I no longer have a body I shall not do anything either, and nevertheless I shall be a more excellent being, more full of feeling and life than the most active of mortals. 5 A modern makes them smaller to his own measure and I, I make myself bigger to theirs. 6 And what error, for example, is not worth more than the art of detecting false friends when this art is acquired only as a result of showing us as such all the ones that one had believed genuine. 7 These Gentlemen act like a band of buccaneers who, torturing a poor Spaniard at their ease with red-hot pincers, benignly consoled him by proving to him by very stoic arguments that pain was not at all an evil. 8 But I did not want either to give her my address or to take hers, being certain that as soon as I had turned my back, she was going to be Pl., I, 1165–1167 51 52 Notes for the Reveries interrogated, and that by transformations familiar to these Gentlemen they would know how to draw from my known intentions an evil much greater than the good that I would have desired to do. 9 And if my finally acknowledged innocence has convinced my persecutors , if the truth shines more brilliantly than the sun to all eyes, far from quelling its rage, the public would only become more relentless from it; it would hate me more then for its own injustice than it hates me today for the vices it likes to attribute to me. It would never pardon me for the indignities with which it has burdened me. They would henceforth be for it my most unpardonable heinous crime. 10 I ought always to do...