But the adulterer destroys any normal and specific harmony between the husband and wife. He introduces into the marriage the open or clandestine usurpation of sworn rights.
Bacon: great mind that sees far into the future. Understands the Cité des Savants: a dream like that in Renan's Dialogues, full of elegant and poetic imagination, etc. But he is
not an expert, his experiences seem to have been those of an alchemist.
La Rochefoucaul. One single fundamental inclination: the love of self. The problem is: are there not two elements to love: egoism and altruism? Sometimes in La R. one only sees a
sort of misanthropy informed by life.
Happiness. On reflection this word conveys a ring of sadness. Object of desire, sort of dream. Philosophy itself sometimes allows itself to be seduced with the images that it illuminates. In Les Memorables, Euthydemus said to Socrates: "If we are not obliged to place happiness on the same order as that which is beneficial, what are we to love?" And later: Therefore, in the end, the morality of happiness = pessimism. True for man, for the child (what is a spoilt child), even for the people: danger in doctrines that make promises to the crowd. Therefore, happiness principle of sadness, principle of unhappiness.
[Formal Logic]
Then Nominalism completes empirical conceptualism. The Name denotes perceptions that have a similarity. In the mind there are only images; but by pronouncing the
name we give rise to several images. The name is therefore the reality of the concept. From there a logical Theory of the role and funcions of the Name:
a sort of universal grammar.
The concept is a creation of the mind, a small mental organism which truly has for its material sensations and images, but which has for its form the laws of the intellect and for its spirit a particular action of the intellect. Besides, the concept corresponds to a part of reality which is not perceptible but only intelligible.
Society, organization of individuals connected by an infinite number of material and spiritual affinities and fulfilling different functions, therefore at the same time jointly
binding and distinct. Smaller society: family. Greater society: nation.
Idea of the ancients - Plato - found again today: organism.
Changes to this idea. Firstly social economy has more and more shown the nature, the complexity, the interlacing of social correspondence like threads in a fabric. Natural
history has better set forth the social character of animal organization: a colony of cells.
Excerpts from several pages of notes from different courses, published in Les Années de college de Marcel Proust, André Ferré, p.242-247. Their current whereabouts are unknown.
Created 09.03.26