Any sensation that the human mind does not pay attention to at all can absolutely not be remembered even the moment after. Memory does not last without attention. Every day we feel sensations that we do not pay attention to, and these we can never remember, even if we really have felt the sensation, without paying attention. E.g., the noise that the pendulum of a clock makes without our paying any attention, because we are used to it. And a hundred others like that. With all the senses, if attention is slight, memory is slight. For example, we will have great difficulty if we wish to recall, even a moment afterward, a speech that we have paid almost no attention to, although we have heard and understood everything [2111] (whereas we will easily recall, long afterward, a much lengthier and more complicated speech that we have carefully attended to, either voluntarily or because it has made a strong impression). If we succeed in recalling it later, in whole or in part, we will recall it easily from then on, because of the attention that we have put into recalling it. In short, memory is not fixed without attention (whether voluntary or involuntary, a distinction I have made elsewhere [→Z 1733‒34]), because memory is the habituation of the intellect, and the intellect does not become habituated without paying attention, for without attention (more or less) it doesn’t operate. Attention doubles or triples sensation, so that the sensation we have not paid attention to is a sensation we have felt only once, and thus have not been able to get used to, that is, to place it in memory. But one that we have paid attention to we have felt in our mind—and repeated rapidly, without realizing it—as if two, three, four times, according to whether our attention was greater [2112] or less (attention, I mean, or the impression, whichever) and so we become more or less habituated, we have more or less accustomed the mind, that is, we have placed the sensation in our memory (willingly or not, deliberately or not) more or less firmly and enduringly. (17 Nov. 1821.)
How the constructions, the progress, the structure that I call natural in a language, differentiating it from the reasonable, the logical, the geometric, have a universal identity, and are more or less easily learned (at least within a particular category of nations and eras), and how, therefore, the very simple and natural (although precisely for that reason very figurative) structure of the Greek language must have facilitated its universality, can be seen in this: that the easiest writings in any language that is new or little known to us are almost always, generally, [2113] the oldest and most primitive, those from the time when the language either was being formed, and was not yet fully formed, or hadn’t even begun to form. So it is with Spanish, with the fourteenth-century Italians (the easiest of our writers), and even with the very obscure German language, whose early epics (as Staël says explicitly of the 13th-century epic titled Nibelung)1 are today also much easier to understand, and clearer, than modern books. In short, what happens is the opposite of what at first glance might seem to be the case, that is, that an unformed language, or one that is not fully formed and correct, and not very logical, is easier than the perfectly formed and logical. (Apart from minutiae such as archaisms, which you need a Dictionary to understand, etc., a problem that doesn’t exist for the foreign apprentif [learner] and is perceived only by the native, etc. etc. And apart from certain bold flights characteristic of the nature of the language and varying according to the character of the nations, the languages, and the individuals of those times, flights which are taxing rather than a hindrance to our understanding. See p. 2153.)2 Similarly, in fact, [2114] the ancient Greek writers are the easiest and clearest, because they are simplest, and use the most natural constructions and phrases. The scholar who has a very good understanding of Xenophon, Demosthenes, Isocrates, etc., may marvel that he does not grasp the Sophists, and Lucian, and Cassius Dio, and the Greek fathers, and other such writers, and a teacher who had his students begin with the more modern Greek writers, believing—what might first seem to be the case—that the more ancient, and more perfectly Greek, must be more difficult, would be wrong. The same is true of Latin as well, that the earlier writers are easier, and their diction much closer to Greek, and so was Latin literature in its beginnings, and the Latin language, even before the literature, and both also independently of the imitation and study of Greek examples and literature. The ancient Latin poets are easier than the prose writers of the golden age. (18 Nov. 1821.)
The ancient Christian thinkers, St. Paul, [2115] the Church Fathers, and, even before Christianity, the pagan philosophers were well aware of a contradiction between the qualities of the human mind, of a struggle and evident hostility between reason and nature, an impediment, fundamental and innate in man (as he had become), to happiness, and consequently a degeneration and corruption of man, known and asserted even in the oldest mythologies.
All these authorities therefore favor my system,1 with the difference that whereas they believed nature to be corrupt and corrupting, I believe that reason is; where they believed it was man, I men; where they believed that the work of God was imperfect in substance, that is, composed of contradictory elements, I believe the work of man imperfect, and, solely because of the work of man, I believe that the work of God is imperfect not in substance but only accidentally, and is composed not of contradictory elements but of acquired qualities that are repugnant [2116] to natural ones, or of corrupt natural qualities, repulsive to one another only because they are corrupt. In short, whereas they saw an immense imperfection in the system and the primitive order of man, I see imperfection in the system inasmuch as, and because, it has diverged from the primitive. And whereas they came to place man outside nature, where everything is perfect of its kind, I put him back inside, and say that he is outside only because he has abandoned his primitive being, etc. etc.
Each of us sees that the one opinion is absurd and the other true and necessary, and yet both derive from a single observation of fact, given which, to me it seems impossible to deduce results different from mine, and even more impossible to deduce the opposite.
Furthermore, the ancients and the majority of the moderns (as is perfectly natural) never clearly differentiated reason from nature, the innate from the purely acquired, those qualities or dispositions [2117] which are in a natural state from those which no longer are. Over and over again they believed, and still do, that reason is nature, the effects of the former the effects of the latter, the essential the accidental, the necessary the random, natural that which nature had put a thousand obstacles in the way of, etc. etc. etc. Hence it is no wonder that they fell and fall into that ridiculous confusion I’ve mentioned, and cannot reconcile man’s natural qualities with one another (while among them they place those which are artificial, and those entirely contrary to nature, and discard the most natural) and cannot unite the parts of the human system, or reconcile human nature with the general system of nature, or with the other individual parts of that system. (18 Nov. 1821.)
For p. 1109, margin, beginning. From secutus we had to make the Italian verb seguitare [to follow] and not secutare because in the case of the Italian seguire, which certainly comes from sequi, we make the participle seguito, not secuto, and seguito just as certainly [2118] comes from secutus, or seguutus, and hence seguitare comes from seguito, and as a result from secutus. (18 Nov. 1821.)
It is pleasurable to be the spectator of vigorous, etc. etc., actions of any sort, not only those relative to man. Thunder, storm, hail, a strong wind, seen or heard, and its effects, etc. Every keen sensation in man brings with it a vein of pleasure, however unpleasurable it is in itself, however terrible, or painful, etc. I heard a farmer whose land was often severely damaged by a nearby river say that nonetheless the sight of the flood was a pleasure as it advanced, rushing swiftly toward his fields, with a thunderous noise, and carrying with it a great mass of rocks, mud, etc.1 And such images, while ugly in themselves, always turn out to be beautiful in poetry, in painting, in eloquence, etc. (18 Nov. 1821.)
For p. 2022, end. The mistake of the Grammarians, etc., [2119] in regard to verbs formed from the
participle in us of other verbs, by cutting off the us and simply adding are in the infinitive—verbs that I call continuatives—is not to have observed that that formation (which they must have known, although I’m not sure if they ever noted it and clearly defined it, specifying its rules and attributes) had a force, and a purpose, and a characteristic, distinctive, special, allotted, fixed, particular value. Sometimes they believed that such verbs were frequentatives, like those in itare, without any difference, or as if the difference in formation between the former and the latter were either random or arbitrary, that is, meaningless; sometimes that they were contractions, or in some way derived from verbs in itare, and replaced them (hence ductare [to lead] was like ductitare, and the same with all the other verbs in are alone, which have [2120] analogous companion verbs in itare, and that the two were used indiscriminately); and sometimes that there was no basic difference in value or quality between the original verbs and those formed from their participles in us by cutting off the us and adding are. (18 Nov. 1821.)
For p. 2059. Conversely, since the political and social circumstances of the Roman Empire were such as I have described, since the capital was so vast, since Rome was the true center, the true image and model of the nation and the empire, and since both were actually contained in Rome, as France is in Paris, things could have happened only as they did happen. That is, the only Latin language, or recognized literary, etc., dialect, was the Roman language, as Parisian is in France, and the language, literature, custom, spirit, taste of the capital determined that of the empire, especially in Italy, as Paris does [2121] in France. The Latin writers, even if they were foreigners, were reared in Rome, and lived there a long time, and that is where, in short, they learned to write Latin. Those who didn’t live in Rome, or who didn’t spend much time there, often diverged from Latin correctness, which could only be Roman; they wrote in a dialect quite different from Roman, and today are called barbarians. This didn’t happen, it can be said, until the late period, especially after Constantine, when Rome, diminished in power and authority, etc., was no longer the center or image of the empire. The degeneration of the Latin language that ensued is ascribed to the times, but it should also be ascribed to the place, that is, the circumstances that destroyed the unity of the Latin language, by removing its center and model, which was Rome, and dividing the language into dialects, and causing Roman to become Latin, and introducing into Latin literature [2122] words, forms, languages that were not Roman. (18 Nov. 1821.) See what follows below.
Italy does not have a capital. Hence Florence is considered the center of the Italian language, as Sicily used to be. In all monarchies, the good, true national language resides in the Capital (Paris, Madrid, or Castile,1 London, etc.), to a greater or lesser extent according to the size, the influence, the social life of that capital, and the spirit and the political and social orders of the nation.
When the center of the language is not the capital, which can happen only when there is no capital, it cannot claim much influence or, indeed, exercise much (for even capitals exercise little linguistic influence if they have little political or social influence). So it was in Greece. Athens exerted or claimed only a small dominion over the language. In Germany, no city exerts it or claims it.
[2123] Furthermore, such influence, whatever it is or was, must be temporary and dependent on circumstances, and is liable to diminish, grow, vanish, and change locations along with circumstances. Such influence, when it does not derive from a capital, or from political influence, can derive only from that social influence which is the result of a predominance in culture and literature, and is exerted through them. Florence and Tuscany were, in fact, predominant from the 14th to the 16th centuries (although less in the 16th, and so their influence on the language was then, in effect, less). It has been so long since they held that predominance that—leaving aside the language, in which the Tuscans are more ignorant than any other Italians (as they were, to a degree, even in the 16th century), as is apparent from everything that is printed in that city (I mean the written language)—Florence with respect to literature is inferior to all the other cultured metropolises and cities [2124] of Italy, except perhaps Rome, and Tuscany surely yields to Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venice, if not to all the Italian provinces, and is certainly not superior to the Marche or Naples.1
Corruption by foreign barbarism is greater in Tuscany—as much in writing as in civil conversation—than in the rest of Italy, and in fact is at its height, and reform has barely set foot there. How then should it be the Captain of this reform? Besides, only in the written, civil language can superiority or inferiority be considered, the only kind that concerns literature, the only kind that can be national.
Preeminence in literature, then, is the only basis on which Florence could have primacy in the language, and in effect did, but it does so no longer and, indeed, has become inferior. (The state of literature in Tuscany is very poor, and—independently of the language—the style, the taste, the metaphors, every quality of style, general and particular, even among the Academicians of the Crusca is so barbarous it’s a wonder, and I don’t think there is such a thing in any of the most uncultured parts of Italy.) If the cause is removed, then the effect must end, as it did in Sicily, which earlier was in the situation of Tuscany, and in Provence,2 which earlier was in the same situation with regard to France.
Saying that Florence or Tuscany must be considered the center and arbiter of the Italian language today as well, because many centuries back it was preeminent in literature, and that its early literature should give it influence over the national modern language, is like saying that Italians should write in an ancient, [2125] dead language (since Tuscan literature is dead). And those who continue to consider Florence an arbiter of the Italian language, and still insist on calling it Tuscan, are, and can only be, the same who consider and want the Italian language to be thought of and used as if it were dead.
Ancient literature, however great it is, is not enough for the modern language. Language (especially where there is no society) is always formed and determined by literature; by always I mean successively and in every era. Hence the current language, being modern, should be determined not by the early literature, that is, by the language that determined it, but by one that at present determines it, that is, by a modern literature. And so the provinces and cities of Italy where literature today is flourishing more than others have a much greater right [2126] to determine the modern Italian language than Tuscany and Florence have. Because this right, and also, in fact, this influence, can be granted in Italy (and in nations without a capital and without society, etc.), only when the literature has absolute preeminence—literature, which is the unique determinant of the language, for it is the unique national and general aspect of a country without society, without political or any other kind of unity. (19 Nov. 1821.) Even supposing that Tuscan was more beautiful and better than Italian (as Attic was than common Greek), nonetheless writers should absolutely seize the one that is less beautiful, and leave the other aside, since their duty is to the common national language, not the more beautiful.1
One of the principal reasons, in addition to the other reasons specified elsewhere [→Z 2060–65], for the great freedom, variety, and richness of Greek and Italian (and also, today, German), qualities typical of their character, can be identified as the opposite circumstance of that which produced the opposite qualities in the Latin and French languages, that is, the lack of a capital, of a national society, of political unity, and of a center of tradition, opinion, [2127] spirit, national literature and language. Homer and Dante (especially Dante) explicitly declared that they did not want to restrict the language to any city or province of Italy, and, as for courtly language, Alighieri, in saying that he was adopting it, meant a language as varied as the courts and republics and governments of Italy were at that time. The case of Homer and Greece was similar in his time and afterward. Such is the case of Italy even today, and such it has been since
Dante. Thus it must be the fundamental maxim of every true Italian linguistic philosopher, as it is among the Germans. (19 Nov. 1821.)
“Signor Botta is accused of using some familiar terms, which did not seem compatible with historical dignity … The observation was deployed in his defense that a particular merit of the Italian language is that it can adapt to any tone, even in the most [2128] serious subjects. In fact, upon closely examining the matter, do we not find that this idiom developed not in the courts but, rather, in a tempestuous republic, where it was needed to express the energy of popular sentiments, not to provide locutions tempered to a placid people, or apparently so? It is from this original imprint that the above-mentioned language received the privilege of being uniquely suitable for describing political revolutions.” Preface by L. de Sevelinges to his translation of the Storia, etc., of C. Botta, in French, translated by Cav. L. Rossi, Milan, Botta, Storia, etc., 1819, 3rd ed., tome 1, pp. LXI-II.1
The reason mentioned here may serve to explain, in part, why the written Italian language (I mean the good and true and old language) is not very different from the spoken, unlike Latin but similar to Greek (e.g., in Demosthenes). In addition to the other reasons that I have noted [2129] elsewhere [→Z 1887ff., 1994ff.]: that is, the nature (the ancient nature) of the times in which our language and literature was formed; the lack of civil society or conversation in Italy, a circumstance that made the written language very like the spoken, because that alone existed before the written, that alone could serve as its origin and model, that alone coexists today with the written language, unlike what happens in France, and similar to what happened in Greece (the less society the nation has, the more familiar and popular the style of the language, and this style is therefore in the same proportion more energetic, true, various, powerful, rich, beautiful); and the reasons I have elsewhere cited [→Z 1808ff.] as proof that, with any language, there is always something familiar in the language of the early writers and as a result in their style, etc. (20 Nov. 1821.)
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