Just beautiful:
D'ALEMBERT: That's what it seems to
me. I have only one remaining difficulty.
DIDEROT: You're wrong. There are a
lot more difficulties.
D'ALEMBERT: But one main one. It
strikes me that we can think only about one thing at a time and in order to form
a simple proposition (since I'm not talking about those enormous chains of
reasoning which include thousands of ideas in their development) we'd say that
it's necessary to have at least two things present, the object which seems to
sit there under the eye of our understanding which at the same time is busy with
the quality which it will affirm or deny about that object.
DIDEROT: I share that concern. And
it's led me sometimes to compare our organic fibres with sensitive vibrating
strings. A sensitive vibrating string oscillates and resonates a long time after
one has plucked it. It's this oscillation, this sort of inevitable resonance,
which holds the present object, while our understanding is busy with the quality
which is appropriate to it. But vibrating strings have yet another property—it's
one that makes other strings quiver. And thus the first idea recalls a second,
and these two a third, then all three a fourth, and so it goes, without our
being able to set a limit to the ideas which are aroused and linked in a
philosopher who meditates or who listens to himself in silence and darkness.
This instrument makes astonishing leaps, and one recalled idea sometimes is
going to set in motion a harmonic at an incomprehensible interval. If the
phenomenon is perceptible between resonating strings, inert and separated, how
could it not take place between vital points linked together, between continuous
and sensitive fibres?
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