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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Durant
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September 26 - October 11, 2019
Bach’s works are the Reformation put to music.
“as the best musicians are not available, we must take a man of moderate ability.”
The year 1729, which gave us The Passion according to St. Matthew, was reckoned by Bach as a bad year, for the weather was so good that there was a dearth of deaths.
This appeal to patriotism opened Bach’s grave.
The revival fell in with the Romantic movement, and with the renewal of religious faith after the Napoleonic Wars.
Brahms said that the two greatest events in German history during his lifetime were the foundation of the German Empire and the complete publication of Bach.
But if history may join Whitman in blowing bugles for the defeated
“Holy Roman Empire.” Voltaire thought it none of the three,
’Tis the established custom for every lady to have two husbands, one that bears the name, and another that performs the duties.
French authors of foreign-published volumes rarely put their names on the title page, and when they were accused of authorship they lied with a stout conscience; this was part of the game, sanctioned by the laws of war. Voltaire not only denied the authorship of several of his books, he sometimes foisted them upon dead people, and he confused the scent by issuing criticisms or denunciations of his own works. The game included devices of form or tricks of expression that helped to form the subtlety of French prose: double meanings, dialogues, allegories, stories, irony, transparent
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Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis —“he snatched the lightning from the sky, and the scepter from the tyrants.”
“Physics and mathematics,” wrote Edward Gibbon in 1761, “are now on the throne. They see their sisters prostrate before them, chained to their car, or at most adorning their triumph. Perhaps their own fall is not far distant.”
“No philosophers here.”
Should you destroy myself as well as my house, library, and apparatus, ten more persons, of equal or superior spirit and ability, would instantly spring up. If those ten were destroyed, an hundred would appear. …
“Tremble,” they wrote, “you who have sucked the blood of the unfortunate.”
Of all the audacities of science the most daring is the attempt to fling its measuring rods around the stars, to subject those scintillating beauties to nocturnal spying, to analyze their constituents across a billion miles, and to confine their motions to man-made logic and laws. Mind and the heavens are the poles of our wonder and study, and the greatest wonder is mind legislating for the firmament.
Our own sun and its planets and their satellites were collectively reduced to a speck in a cosmos of light.
There were many more whom history should commemorate, though it would spoil the story to tell all.
Though he made no pretense to marital fidelity,96 he learned to love his wife, as many Frenchmen do after adultery,
In this sense Plato was right: man is real, men are fleeting moments in the phantasmagoria of life.
For Buffon belongs to literature as well as to science, and only integrated history can do him justice.
“As a writer I know none his equal. His is the first pen of his century.”
Buffon wrote as a man freed from want and dowered with time; there was nothing hurried in his work, as often in Voltaire; he labored as carefully with his words as with his specimens.
“the style is the man.”
Truth can be a fact of feeling as well as a structure of reason or a perfection of form.
Buffon’s style was the man, a robe of dignity for an aristocratic soul.
place. In literature the hydra has served as a simile with a hundred thousand lives.
all nature is a series of efforts to produce even more perfect beings;
Nature works her way upward through minerals, plants, and beasts to man. Man himself is only a stage in the great enterprise: beings more perfect will someday replace him.
“Judgment, reflection, desires, passions, etc., are merely sensations variously transformed.”134 Attention is born with the first sensation. Judgment comes with the second, which begets comparison with the first. Memory is a past sensation revived by a present sensation or by another memory. Imagination is a memory vividly revived, or a group of memories projected or combined. Desire or aversion is the active memory of a pleasant or disagreeable sensation. Reflection is the alternation of memories and desires. Will is a strong desire accompanied by an assumption that the object is attainable.
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we have recognized the scientists as well as their science as belonging to history, it is also because the evolution of ideas is our basic interest, and because ideas played a role in the eighteenth century next only to the nature of man himself.
The major impact of science was naturally upon philosophy, for philosophy, which is the quest of wisdom, must build upon science, which is the pursuit of knowledge.
The effect of science upon religion—or rather upon Christianity—seemed lethal.
“When we open the pages of Haller,” said Sir William Foster, “we feel that we have passed into modern times.”9
“in love a man may lose his heart with dignity, … if he loses his nose he loses his character into the bargain.”17
Feldscherer, field cutter,
“Everything gives way to the great art of the healer. The doctor is the one philosopher who deserves well of his country.… The mere sight of him restores our calm, … and breeds fresh hope.”
served as surgeon in the French army, and saw “one per cent glory and ninety-nine per cent diarrhea”
“The word encyclopédie” said the prospectus, “signifies the interrelationship of the sciences”;
The most important publishing enterprise of the century had consumed him, but had made him as immortal as the vicissitudes of civilization will permit.
lost themselves safely in logical cobwebs and metaphysical clouds.
“Reason is for the philosopher what grace is for the Christian.”
physiocrats
“What absurdity in our judgments! We exhort men to occupy themselves usefully, and we despise useful men.”
mosaic of borrowings.”
Now the gospel of reason as against mythology, of knowledge as against dogma, of progress through education as against the resigned contemplation of death, all passed like a pollen-laden wind over Europe, disturbing every tradition, stimulating thought, at last fomenting revolt. The Encyclopédie was the revolution before the Revolution.
Ideas were his meat and drink. He gathered them, savored and sampled them, and poured them out in a profuse chaos whenever he found a blank sheet or a willing ear.
He saw every point of view except those of the priest and the saint, because he had no certainties.
As for me, I concern myself more with forming than with dissipating clouds, with suspending judgment rather than with judging.… I do not decide, I ask questions.3 … I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad, that may come uppermost; I chase it as do young libertines on the track of a courtesan whose face is windblown and smiling, whose eyes sparkle, and whose nose turns up.… My ideas are my trollops.4
