Life is thought of as the only thing that is necessary, though in fact it is the least necessary of all. For all needs or desires have their reason in life, while life, particularly when it is devoid of things that are either necessary or desirable, has no reason for its necessity or desirability in any thing. (6 April 1821.)
The superiority of nature over all the works of man or the effects of man’s actions can also be seen in the fact that all the philosophers of the last century, and all those who go by that name today, and in general all educated persons this century, which is indisputably [926] the most educated that ever was, have no other purpose in politics (a chief part of human knowledge) and cannot find anything better than what nature had already found on its own in the original form of society, namely to rightly restore to social man that liberty which was the cornerstone of all ancient politics in all the uncorrupted nations, and likewise today in all the populations that are uncivilized and at the same time unbarbarized, that is, all those which are termed barbarous, and have that original barbarism, and not the barbarism of corruption.1 (6 April 1821.)
For p. 872. The only reason why praising oneself is odious and is held to be a breach of good manners is because it offends the self-love of the listener. And for that reason pride is a vice in society, and for the same reason humility is cherished and regarded as a virtue. (7 April 1821.)
In any nation ancient or modern, great errors contrary to nature may be found, and great knowledge contrary to nature everywhere; there you will find nothing, or very little, that is great or beautiful or good. And this is one of the main reasons why the Eastern nations—even though they were great, even though their history goes back to the earliest times, times that are ordinarily accompanied by the great and the beautiful, even though they were profoundly ignorant in the last analysis and therefore free of the huge obstacles produced by reason and truth, today as well—nonetheless offer almost nothing that is truly great or truly beautiful, and this is so both [927] as regards actions, customs, the enthusiasm and virtue of life, and as regards the products of the intellect and the imagination. And if the Greeks and the Romans tower above all the peoples of antiquity it is in large part because their errors and illusions were in the main very much in accord with nature, so that they were equally distant from the corruption of ignorance and from its lack. By contrast with Eastern peoples whose superstitions and errors, which though they are modern and current are mostly of very ancient date, were and are in large part contrary to nature, and hence may truly be termed barbarous. And it may fairly be said that, where the great and the beautiful are concerned, no ancient people can compare with the Greeks and the Romans. Which may also stem from the fact that because the golden ages of other peoples, like the Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Persians, etc. etc., came earlier in time, since these peoples are much older, their memory did not come down as far as us but remained in the dark night of antiquity, with which the epoch of their golden ages happened to coincide; and conversely the only memory to reach us was that of their corruption and barbarism, which naturally succeeded civilization and just happened to be contemporary with the greatness and the flowering of the Greek and Roman peoples. If their greatness [928] fills and dominates our histories, it is because it was nearer to these histories in time and could more easily filter down to them, and because it did effectively dominate in times closer to our own. Indeed, it is fair to say that everything great and beautiful regarding antiquity that there is in our histories, and in any memory we may have, belongs entirely to the last epoch of antiquity, of which the Greeks and Romans were effectively the last peoples. “῏Ω ῞Ελληνες ἀεὶ παῖδές ἐστε” [“O Greeks, you are always children”], etc., Plato, in the person of that Egyptian priest.1 (10 April 1821.) See p. 2331.
It would not seem possible to derive spegnere [to extinguish], a word which today belongs exclusively to Italian, from anything other than σβεννύειν, with a shift, setting aside desinence, of the β to p, a common enough shift since they are two sounds produced by the same organ, that is, they are labial, and of the double ν to gn, the latter also being common, and very common in Spanish, which turns annus into año [year], etc. etc. If then spegnere does derive from that Greek word, one must presume that it was used in ancient Latin (whether these shifts, or rather, differences of sound already existed in Latin, or whether they were introduced in transmitting this word from Latin into Italian), all the more so given that the use of this same verb spegnere was limited (or so I believe) to Italy alone. Forcellini has nothing similar in words beginning with exb, exp, exsb, exsp, sb, sp. Likewise Du Cange, whom I have looked through with care. (10 April 1821.)
Sanskrit, that venerable Indian language, which no matter how variously altered and corrupted, and divided into very many dialects, is still living and is spoken throughout [929] Hindustan, (Annali di scienze e lettere, Milan 1811, January, vol. 5, no. 13. Wilkins, “Grammar of the Sanskrita language”: an article translated from one by an eminent man of letters in the Edinburgh Review, pp. 28, 29, 31, end–32, beginning, and 32, middle; 35, end–36, beginning)1 and in other parts of India (ibid., 28, end) and notably under the name of the Pali language “in all the nations” situated to the east of India (ibid., 36); the language that Sir William Jones,2 renowned for his knowledge both of Eastern matters and of Eastern and Western languages (ibid., 37, beginning and end), “has not scrupled to call ‘more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more excellently refined than either’”3 (ibid., 52); that language from which, in the opinion of some English scholars of our own century, drawing on noteworthy arguments and comparisons, the Greek, Latin, Gothic, and ancient Egyptian or Ethiopian languages were derived (along with the early popular religious systems of all these nations), or shared a common origin (ibid., 37, 38, beginning and end); this language, so very ancient, rich, and perfect, since it has eight cases, does not use prepositions with nouns (“its eight cases render the use of prepositions superfluous” ibid., 52, end); rather “in Sanskrit these are exclusively employed as prefixes to verbs,” as is done in Greek, “being without signification alone” (ibid.). So that all its prepositions are expressly and uniquely designed for composition, and by this means for varying and multiplying the meanings [930] of the verbs. (You can see, if you wish, some other peculiarities of this language, in fact analogous to the peculiarities and merits of our own ancient languages, as the Compiler of the article expressly observes, at the end of this article, that is, from the middle of p. 52 to the end of p. 53.) (11 April 1821.)
Today, man in society is what one column of air is in relation to all the others, and to each of them. If it collapses, through rarefaction or for any other reason, the distant columns exert pressure upon those near at hand, and since these latter exert just as much pressure on all sides, all hurry to occupy and take its place. So it is with man in the egoistic society. With the one exerting pressure on the other, when a particular individual subsides in some way or other, through lack of ability, or strength, or through virtue, and because he leaves a vacuum of egoism, he is certain to be immediately trampled by the egoism that surrounds him on every side: and to be crushed like a pneumatic machine from which the air had been removed without due precautions being taken.1 (11 April 1821.)
To what I have said [→Z 896–910] about ancient wars as compared to modern ones add that an entire nation will be able to wage war for some unjust cause (although with more difficulty than the prince can) but never just on a whim. With the prince it is the opposite. Because many people cannot have one and the same whim, a whim being something that is relative and that varies from one head to [931] the next and that does not have a uniform reason for existing. So it is that the nation cannot fully agree to a whim. But if it does not have to agree to it, since it already wholly depends on a single man and he, being a man, has whims like everyone else, and more than other people, because he is master and because his whim can decide on war and peace, and everything that has
to do with his subjects, see what the consequences are, observe whether they agree with the facts, and then tell me also whether, from the possibility of waging war on a whim, it follows that modern wars should be rarer or more frequent than ancient ones. (11 April 1821.)
There is nothing more unpleasant and offensive to a man afflicted and oppressed by melancholy and by present misfortune, or by the present sense of it, than a tone of frivolity and dissipation in those who surround him, and any appearance of inane cheerfulness. Much more so if it is applied to him, and above all if good manners, or any other reason, oblige him to take part. (12 April 1821.)
The same disparity that exists between the ancients and the moderns, with regard on the one hand to beauty, imagination, gladness, and happiness, and on the other to truth, reason, melancholy, and unhappiness, is to be found proportionately in every age ancient or modern, between southern peoples and northern. Although antiquity was the age of the beautiful, [932] and of the imagination, Greece and Italy were even then their homeland, and their place. And no matter how little those times were suited to profundity of intellect, truth, melancholy, still the natural tendency of northerners to have these qualities is evident, and in hymns, songs, and sayings drawn from the Bards one may observe, aside from their famous melancholy, a certain profundity of thought, and the observation of certain truths that even today, when philosophy has advanced so far, are not the most trivial. In short, one may observe in them a quality of thought whose profundity differs markedly from that of southerners of the same times. (See, if you will, the Annali di scienze e lettere, Milan, vol. 6, no. 18, June 1811: “Memoria intorno ai Druidi e ai Bardi Britanni,” pp. 376–78 and 383, end–385, where several of the Bards’ aphorisms and documents are recorded.)1 Thus, on the contrary, although the modern age is the age of thought, the north is its homeland, and Italy still preserves some small part of its natural imagination, its sense of the beautiful, its natural tendency toward gladness and happiness. In what I have said [→Z 143–44], then, about my different states with respect to imagination and philosophy, where I compared myself with the progression from modern to ancient times, one may also add the comparison with southern and northern peoples.2 (12 April 1821.)
The real expanse, strictly understood, of which a language is capable, insofar as it is an ordinary, everyday language [933] and one’s own mother tongue, is very small; and much smaller than is generally believed. A strictly uniform use of language, and consequently one and the same language strictly understood, is common only to a very small number of persons, and occupies only a small geographical expanse.
(1) Everyone can see how many recognized, written, and specifically differentiated languages Europe and the world is divided into, and how each nation uses a language that is specifically different from others, and characteristically its own, even though it may have some greater or lesser affinity with foreign ones.
(2) As a nation becomes more widely dispersed, and occupies too broad an expanse of land, and comes to contain too great a number of individuals, the uninterrupted experience of the ages and the testimony of all histories demonstrate that the language of such a nation divides, its uniformity is lost, and though the nation may be truly and originally the same, its language is no longer one and the same. This is what happened to the language of the Celts, who were spread across Gaul, Spain, Britain, and Italy, etc., and the Celtic language was then divided into as many languages as there were countries that the nation had occupied. The same happened to the German language, the Slav language, etc., and among the Eastern languages Arabic, with the spread of the Mohammedans.
(3) Although a conquering people may transfer and plant their language in the conquered land, and also wholly destroy the native language, once their language is in that country it gradually alters, until it ends up becoming a different language from the one they introduced. Witness the Romans, [934] whose language—which they implanted with conquest in France and in Spain (to limit ourselves to these for now) while the indigenous language was completely destroyed (since any minimal residues that might still remain do not count)—simply altered little by little, until in the end it produced from within itself two languages that were formally quite distinct from itself, namely, French and Spanish. The same might be said of countless other families of European and non-European languages, each of which issued from a single language, but, as their speakers spread, multiplied and divided into all the languages that that family contains.
(4) From the observations above, one may also deduce that this natural and positive impossibility for a language to expand more than a certain amount in territory and in number of speakers (whether it is due to the climate, which naturally causes languages to be differentiated, or for any other reason) does not depend solely on the admixture of other languages, which may damage a particular language as it expands and drives other languages out of the space it moves into. For it is, in fact, an absolute, innate, material impossibility, which means that even if the whole of the rest of the world were empty or dumb, once that particular language had spread more than a certain amount, it would gradually divide into further languages. I intend to substantiate this claim in the following observations also.
(5) The colonies that transfer a language root and branch to various places by importing its own native [935] speakers are subject to the same circumstance. Witness the three famous, and principal dialects of the Greek colonies, Ionic, Doric, and Aeolic, not to mention countless other examples.
(6) That is not all. Even without occupying distant foreign lands or transferring to other places it is enough for a nation to spread and form a group of a certain size for its language, inside the guts of the nation itself, to divide and differentiate itself to a greater or lesser degree from its original state, and increasingly so as it distances itself from the first, limited seat of the nation, from the first source of the nation and the language, which only stays pure in the exact and limited place where it was first spoken. Witness the very many minor dialects into which the Greek language split within Greece itself, a country of such limited geographic extent, namely, Boeotian, Laconic, Macedonian, Spartan, Thessalian, with its principal dialects being further subdivided into other minor ones, namely, Cretan, Sciot, Cypriot, Cyrenaean, Delphic, Ephesian, Lydian, Lycian, Megarian, Pamphilian, Phoenician, Reggian, Sicilian, Syracusan, Tarentinian, etc. (See Sisti, Introduzione alla lingua greca, § 211.)1 Witness the dialects of the Italian language, of the French, Spanish, German languages, and of all languages ancient or modern, provided that their speakers have expanded beyond a certain point in numbers or territory.2 On the Hebrew language being divided into dialects among the Jewish tribes themselves, and in Canaan itself, see Judges, ch. 12, ll. 5–6, and the commentators. The Chaldean language, etc., is simply a dialect of Hebrew. Samaritan likewise; or Hebrew is a dialect of Samaritan, or an offshoot or corruption of Samaritan. On the three Egyptian-Coptic dialects, all three of which are written, see Giorgi.3
(7) Nor is this all. For within the bounds of one and the same dialect, there is not a single city whose language does not differ to a greater or lesser extent from that of the one nearest to it, whose language does not differ, I mean, in the tone and inflection and modulation of the pronunciation, in the different inflection and modification of the [936] words, and in various words, phrases, and manners of speech entirely its own. This can be seen in the cities of Tuscany (so much so that Varchi for that reason wants written Italian not to be called Italian, or even Tuscan, but Florentine),1 in other cities in any other Italian province, and everywhere. Furthermore, in each city urban language is different from rural language. Furthermore, without going outside the city itself, it is well known that even in Florence more than one dialect is spoken, depending on the various districts (and Varchi refers to this as well).2 So that a language cannot be strictly uniform and shared even in one and the same city if it has spread and grown in number of speakers beyond a certain point. And I think the same will be the case also
in Paris, etc. See p. 1301, end.
From these facts we deduce some higher and more important consequences: (1) That the diversity of languages is natural and inevitable among men, and that the proliferation of mankind brought with it the multiplicity of languages, and the division and subdivision of the original idiom, and finally, the incapacity of more than a certain number of men to make themselves understood, or as a consequence to achieve reciprocal communication. The confusion of tongues, which Scripture states to have been a punishment visited by God upon humanity, is therefore effectively rooted in nature, inevitable in mankind, and an essential characteristic of nations, etc.3
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