ptable and more
deceptive, especially in all that relates to human life and society.
Here, due to the growth of government, to the multiplication of
services, to the entanglement of interests, the object, indefinitely
enlarged and complex, now eludes our grasp. Our vague, incomplete,
incorrect idea of it badly corresponds with it, or does not correspond
at all. In nine minds out of ten, or perhaps ninety-nine out of a
hundred, it is but little more than a word. The others, if they desire
some significant indication of what society actually is beyond the
teachings of books, require ten or fifteen years of close observation
and study to re-think the phrases with which these have filled their
memory, to interpret them anew, to make clear their meaning, to get at
and verify their sense, to substitute for the more or less empty and
indefinite term the fullness and precision of a personal impression. We
have seen how ideas of Society, State, Government, Sovereignty, Rights,
Liberty, the most important of all ideas, were, at the close of the
eighteenth century, curtailed and falsified; how, in most minds, simple
verbal reasoning combined them together in dogmas and axioms; what an
offspring these metaphysical simulacra gave birth to, how many lifeless
and grotesque abortions, how many monstrous and destructive chimeras.
There is no place for any of these fanciful dreams in the mind of
Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion
to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond
disdain, even to disgust.[1152] That which was then called ideology, is
his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation,
but still more through an instinctive demand for what is real, as a
practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great
Catherine, "that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide,
which is ticklish." Every idea entertained by him had its origin in
his personal observation, and he used his own personal observations to
control them.

If books are useful to him it is to suggest questions, which he never
answers but through his own experience. He has read only a little, and
hastily;[1153] his classical education is rudimentary; in the way of
Latin, he remained in the lower class. The instruction he got at the
Military Academy as well as at Brienne was below mediocrity, while,
after Brienne, it is stated that "for the languages and belles-lettres,