C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Of Man
By Joseph Joubert (1754–1824)
Translation of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
T
HE BODY is the tent where our existence is encamped.
The voice is a human sound which nothing lifeless can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an impressiveness which writing wants. It is not merely air, but air modulated by us, impregnated with our warmth, and as it were enveloped in the haze of our atmosphere; from which an emanation attends it, and which gives it a certain form and certain virtues fitted to act on the mind. Speech is only thought incorporated.
The more I think on it, the more I see that the mind is something outside of the soul, as the hands are outside of the body, the eyes outside of the head, the branches outside of the trunk. It helps to do more, but not to be more.
The mind is a fire of which thought is the flame.
The imagination is the eye of the soul.
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