My Thoughts

My Thoughts

My Thoughts  1 [1] some detached reflections or thoughts that i have not put in my works. [2] These are ideas that I have not delved into deeply, and that I am putting aside in order to think about them as the occasion allows. [3] I will be very careful not to answer for all the thoughts that are here. I have put most of them here only because I have not had time to reflect on them, but I will think about them when I make use of them. [4] Devotion arises from a desire to play some role in the world, whatever the cost. [5] My son, you have enough good fortune not to have to either blush or swell with pride because of your birth. {My birth is proportionate to my fortune in such a way that I would be disturbed if one or the other were greater.} You will be a man of the robe or the sword. Since you will be responsible for your status, it is up to you to choose. In the robe, you will find more independence and freedom; in the sword camp, grander hopes. You are permitted to want to rise to the more eminent posts, because every citizen is permitted to want to be in a position to render greater services to his Country. Moreover, noble ambition is a sentiment useful to society when it is well directed. [It is a great workman who has made our being and has given our souls certain tendencies and certain penchants.]  [4] 1. On devotion, see pensées 445, 594, 1140, and 1405. [5] 1. Jean-Baptiste de Secondat (February 10, 1716–June 17, 1795), Montesquieu’s only son. He was a man of neither robe (i.e., the magistracy) nor sword nobility. Raised in Paris, he engaged in scientific research at the Jesuit collège (secondary school) of Louis-le-Grand. On August 30, 1740, he married Marie-Thérèse de Mons in Bordeaux. 2. By his father, Jacques de Secondat, and his paternal uncle, Jean-Baptiste de Secondat, Montesquieu belonged to a family of sword and of robe; by his mother, Marie-Françoise de Pesnel, he descended from the noble house of La Lande, which from the end of the eleventh century was established on the territory of La Brède. 3. See pensée 1183 for a reworking of this thought. 4. Robe, magistracy, legal profession, so called because of the long gown worn by its members; often contrasted with épée, or sword, as being two types of nobility. See also pensée 30.—hc 2 Pensées 6–13 Just as the physical world continues to exist only because each part of matter tends to move away from the center, so too the political world is maintained by that restless inner desire possessed by everyone to leave the situation in which he is placed. It is in vain that an austere morality would efface the features that the greatest of all workmen has imprinted on our souls. It is up to morality, which would work on man’s heart, to regulate his sentiments, not destroy them. [6] Our moral authors are almost all extremists; they speak to the pure understanding, not to that soul which in its unity is newly modified by means of the senses and the imagination. [7] It is always adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires. [8] The invention of the postal service has created politics; we don’t politick with the Mughal. [9] Does this art of politics make our histories more splendid than those of the Greeks and Romans? [10] There are few events in the world that do not depend on so many circumstances that it would take a worldly eternity for them to occur a second time. [11] If the Jesuits had come before Luther and Calvin, they would have been masters of the world. [12] Perhaps one could say that the reason why most peoples give themselves such an ancient lineage is that, the creation being incomprehensible to human understanding, they think the world itself has existed forever. [13] Nice book by one André cited by Athenaeus: De Iis quae falso creduntur [On those things that are wrongly believed]. 5. First version: “by a certain tendency to leave the situation in which he is placed.” [8] 1...