Everything is made through images. They enter us through all the other senses, as through the eye. An echo (they say) is an image of the voice. All our affections are produced by images of touching. Our whole body is a mirror.

Joubert treats “image” broadly: not only visual pictures but the mind’s internal representations formed through every sense. Sound (echo as an “image” of a voice), touch, and bodily feeling all generate impressions that become the raw material of thought and emotion. The claim that “our whole body is a mirror” suggests the self is reflective and receptive—constantly taking in, translating, and returning the world as sensation and feeling. In this view, affections are not purely rational choices but arise from embodied, sensory images that shape desire, fear, sympathy, and memory. The passage aligns with Joubert’s moral-psychological interest in how perception and imagination govern inner life.