Joseph Joubert (1754–1824). Joubert: A Selection from His Thoughts. 1899.
Chapter II.
Of Man, the Organs, the Soul, the Intellectual Faculties
[1] THERE are two existences that a man, prisoned within himself, might know: his own and God’s; I am, therefore God is. But sensation only can teach him the existence of bodies.
[4] The soul is to the eyes what sight is to the touch; it seizes what eludes the senses. As in art the greatest beauty is beyond law, so in knowledge the highest and the truest is beyond experience.
[7] What we call soul in man is unchanging, but what we call mind differs with every age, every situation, every day. The mind is a mobile thing whose direction changes with every wind that blows.
[9] Plato is wrong: there are some things that may be communicated, but not taught; some that we may obviously possess without the power of communicating them. Strictly speaking, perhaps, a man is only learned in what can be taught; but he may be gifted with an art which could not be transmitted: such as quickness of grasp, instinct, genius; such as also, perhaps, the art of knowing and governing men.
[10] Our mind has more thoughts than our memory can store; it delivers many judgments of which it could not give the reasons; it sees further than it can reach, it knows more truths than it can explain. A large part of itself could be very usefully employed in searching out the arguments which have determined it, in defining the perceptions which have touched and then escaped it. There is for the soul many a lightning-flash with which she has little to do; they pass over and illuminate her so rapidly that she loses the recollection of them. We should be astonished at the number of things she would be found to have seen, if, in returning upon all that has passed within her, record could be made of it, if only from memory, and by a careful searching out of all the circumstances. We do not hunt enough in ourselves; and like children we neglect what we have in our pockets, and think only of what is in our hands, or before our eyes.
[15] It is to imagination that the greatest truths are revealed; for instance, Providence, its course, its designs; they escape our judgment; imagination alone sees them.
