Chapter I: Notes

Let us first open at the memoranda relating to his daily occupations:

“Plan in the morning the work of the day, and reflect in the evening on what has been done.”

“Carry when walking a book, and a note-book to preserve the ideas, and a piece of bread in order to prolong the walk if need be.”

“Vary the mental and bodily exercises with dancing, horsemanship, swimming, fencing with sword and with sabre, shooting with gun and pistol, skating, the sling, stilts, tennis, bowls; hop on one foot, cross the arms, jump high and far, turn on one foot propped against the wall, exercise in shirt in the evening to get up a perspiration before going to bed; turning, joinery, gardening, reading while walking, declamation, singing, violin, versification, musical composition; eight hours of sleep; a walk on awakening, before and after eating; great sobriety; eat slowly, little, and often; avoid idleness and useless meditation.”

Then come more general precepts:

“Adopt good habits when I change my method of life.”

“Never turn to the past unless to enlighten the future. Regrets are useless.”

“Form resolutions in advance in order not to reflect during action. Then obey thyself blindly.”

“The promptitude of resolutions most frequently accords with their justice.”

“Yield frequently to the first inspiration. Too much meditation on the same subject ends by suggesting the worst part, or at least causes loss of precious time.”

“Suffer slight disagreeables without seeming to perceive them, but repulse decisively any one who evidently intends to injure or humiliate you.”

“One should never feign a character that he has not, or affect a character that he cannot sustain.”

“Self-possession without self-sufficiency. Courage without effrontery.”

“Make intimate acquaintances only with much circumspection; perfect confidence in those who have been thoroughly tested. Nothing to do with others.”

“Question thyself to learn what will please others.”

“No useless discourse. All conversation which does not serve to enlighten ourselves or others, to interest the heart or amuse the mind, is hurtful.”

“Speak little of what you know, and not at all of what you do not know.”

“Why not say more frequently, ‘I do not know’?”

“Speak to every one of that which he knows best. This will put him at his ease, and be profitable to you.”

“Abstain from all pleasantry which could wound.”

“Employ only expressions of the most perfect propriety.”

“Listen attentively to your interlocutor, and so prepare him to listen in the same way to your reply, and predispose him in favor of your arguments.”

“Show neither passion nor weariness in discussion.

“Never direct an argument against any one. If you know some particulars against your adversary, you have a right to make him aware of it to keep him under control, but proceed with discretion, and do not wound him before others.”

“When discussion degenerates into dispute, be silent; this is not to declare yourself beaten.”

“How much modesty adds to merit! A man of talent who conceals his knowledge is like a branch bending under a weight of fruit.”

“Why try to be witty? I would rather be thought stupid and modest than witty and pretentious.”

“Men desire nothing so much as to make themselves envied.”

“Egotism is the most common and most hated of all vices. Properly speaking, it is the only one which should be hated.”

“The pleasures of self-love are the only ones that can really be turned into ridicule.”

“I do not know why these two expressions, good sense and common sense, are confounded. There is nothing less common than good sense.”

“The strain of suffering causes the mind to decay.”

We will quote one of those misanthropic sallies the rarity of which we are glad to remark:

“It must be that all honest people are in the galleys; only knaves are to be met with elsewhere.”

But serenity of mind returns immediately after the above:

“I rejoice for all the misfortunes which might have happened to me, and which I have escaped.”

“Life is a short enough passage. I am half the journey. I will complete the remainder as I can.”

“Hope being the greatest of all blessings, it is necessary, in order to be happy, to sacrifice the present to the future.”

“Let us not be exacting; perfection is so rare.”

“Indulgence! Indulgence!”

“The more nearly an object approaches perfection, the more we notice its slightest defects.”

“To neglect the opportunity of an innocent pleasure is a loss to ourselves. It is to act like a spendthrift.”

“_Recherché_ pleasures cause simple pleasures to lose all their attractions.”

“It may sometimes be necessary to yield the right, but how is one to recover it when wanted?”

“Love is almost the only passion that the good man may avow. It is the only one which accords with delicacy.”

“Do nothing that all the world may not know.”

“The truly wise man is he who loves virtue for its own sake.”

“We say that man is an egotist, and nevertheless his sweetest pleasures come to him through others. He only tastes them on condition of sharing them.”

“If one could continually satisfy his desires, he would never have time to desire. Happiness then is necessarily composed of alternatives. It could not exist at a constant level.”

On the subject of nations and conquerors:

“To each conqueror can be said, when he has ceased tormenting our poor globe, ‘Would you not have been able to tilt equally well against a little globe of pasteboard?’”

“The laws of war, do they say? As if war were not the destruction of all laws.”

“War has been represented as necessary to prevent the too rapid increase of the population, but war mows down the flower of the young men, while it spares the men disgraced by nature. Hence it tends to the degeneration of the species.”

Then the writer turns his shafts against medicine:

“In some respects medicine is directly opposed to the will of nature, which tends to perpetuate the strongest and best of the species, and to abandon the delicate to a thousand forms of destruction. This is what occurs among animals and savage men. Only the most robust attain the adult age, and these only reproduce the species. Medicine and the aids of the social state prolong the lives of feeble creatures whose posterity is usually equally feeble. Among the Spartans, barbarous regulations put an end to the existence of malformed infants, that the strength and beauty of the race might be preserved. Such regulations are antipathetic to our customs; nevertheless it might be desirable that we should devote ourselves to the preservation of the human race from the causes of weakness and degeneracy.”

“The decadence of the Greeks and Romans without change of race proves the influence of institutions upon customs.”

We will give here a fragment on political economy, to show the variety contained in the pages on which we draw:

“According to the system of modern economists, it would be desirable that the government should interfere as little as possible in the commerce and industry of the country. Nevertheless we cannot deny that in certain circumstances this intervention is very useful.”

“Taxes are regarded by economists as an evil, but as a necessary evil, since they provide for public expenses. Consequently, economists think that if the government possessed sufficient revenues, in domains for example, the suppression of all taxes would be a desirable measure.”

“Taxes are a means of influencing production and commerce to give to them a direction which they would not naturally have taken. Such an influence may undoubtedly have disagreeable consequences if the taxes are imposed without discrimination or exclusively for a fiscal purpose, but it is entirely otherwise if wisdom and tact preside at their institution.”

“A tax on the rent of a farm would be much better than a tax on the land itself. Proprietors then could only avoid taxes by themselves improving their property. As it is, they merely collect the rents, and usually employ their surplus in unproductive expenditure, while the proprietary farmers voluntarily devote theirs to the improvement of the land.”

“A tax on the farms would then result in the proprietors themselves working the lands, and this would mean better cultivation, and improvements which would yield returns indeed, but at too remote a period for the tenant. It would tend to a division of landed property, men of small fortune uniting in the purchase with capitalists who seek only the rent or payment for the land.”

“Great capitalists could not themselves cultivate vast extents of land, and not wanting to diminish their revenues by renting them, would be induced to sell portions suitable for cultivation by their new owners, and would then carry their money into new industrial and commercial enterprises.”

“The competition of the sellers would cause a momentary fall in the price of the lands, and would enable small farmers to become land-owners. The number of vast estates often badly managed would then be diminished, and considerable fortunes, changing hands more easily, would naturally pass into those which would be most likely to increase their value.”

“Proprietors, becoming cultivators to escape the taxes, would settle in the country, where their presence would disseminate intelligence and comfort; their revenues, before spent unprofitably, would then pay expenses and improvements on their property.”

“The establishment of such a tax would certainly find many opponents among proprietors, landed non-cultivators who form in fact the influential _personnel_ in the state, for it is they who usually make the laws.”

“Perhaps it would be necessary to weaken their opposition by not subjecting the actual proprietors to the new tax, which might take effect only with the next change either by sale or by inheritance. A restriction of the right of transfer would also facilitate the passage from one situation to the other. All changes in taxes should, as a general thing, be made gradually, in order to avoid sudden changes of fortune.”

“We may consider the renting of a property for several years as a sale of the usufruct during the time of the lease. Now nine years’ possession, for example, is equal to more than a third of the value of the property, supposing the annual product to be one twentieth of the capital. It would then be reasonable to apply to this sort of sale the laws which govern that of landed property, and consequently the mutation tax. The person who cannot or will not cultivate his soil, instead of alienating the property itself, binds himself to alienate the usufruct for a time, and the price is paid at stated intervals instead of all at once. There is farm rent.”

“Now it is by a fiction that the purchaser pays the mutation tax. In fact, it is always the seller who pays it. The buyer compares the money that he spends with the advantage that he gains, and this comparison determines it. If he did not make money out of it he would not buy it. When the registration tax did not exist, the purchaser had to pay the same sum for the same purpose, and this sum went into the pocket of the seller.”

“Proprietors of lands, then, after all, have to bear the mutation taxes. All increase of these taxes is a loss for them, and these taxes are heavier on the small proprietors than on the large, because their changes are more frequent. The tax on the farms, on the contrary, would bear more heavily on large estates.”

“The tax on farms not affecting the owners of timber, would be made up by a tax on the felling, a very justifiable tax, for standing timber is landed property. Standing timber is often worth much more than the land on which it stands.”

Finally, we will give some thoughts which reveal the religious sentiments of Sadi Carnot:

“Men attribute to chance those events of the causes of which they are ignorant. If they succeed in divining these causes, chance disappears. To say that a thing has happened by chance, is to say that we have not been able to foresee it. I do not myself believe that any other acceptation can be given to this word. What to an ignorant man is chance, cannot be chance to one better instructed.”

“If human reason is incapable of discovering the mysteries of Divinity, why has not Divinity made human reason more clear-sighted?”

“God cannot punish man for not believing when he could so easily have enlightened and convinced him.”

“If God is absolutely good, why should He punish the sinner for all eternity, since He does not lead him to good, or give him an example?”

“According to the doctrine of the church, God resembles a sphinx proposing enigmas, and devouring those who cannot guess them.”

“The church attributes to God all human passions—anger, desire for vengeance, curiosity, tyranny, partiality, idleness.”

“If Christianity were pruned of all which is not Christ, this religion would be the simplest in the world.”

“What motives have influenced the writers who have rejected all religious systems? Is it the conviction that the ideas which they oppose are all injurious to society? Have they not rather included in the same proscription religion and the abuse of it?”

“The belief in an _all-powerful_ Being, who loves us and watches over us, gives to the mind great strength to endure misfortune.”

“A religion suited to the soul and preached by men worthy of respect would exercise the most salutary influence upon society and customs.”