qually
suggestive. Bonaparte carefully searched out the weak places of the
organism which he was about to attack--in the present campaign, Egypt
and the British Empire. The climate and natural products, the genius
of its writers and the spirit of its religion--nothing came amiss to
his voracious intellect, which assimilated the most diverse materials
and pressed them all into his service. Greek mythology provided
allusions for the adornment of his proclamations, the Koran would
dictate his behaviour towards the Moslems, and the Bible was to be his
guide-book concerning the Druses and Armenians. All three were
therefore grouped together under the head of Politics.

And this, on the whole, fairly well represents his mental attitude
towards religion: at least, it was his work-a-day attitude. There were
moments, it is true, when an overpowering sense of the majesty of the
universe lifted his whole being far above this petty opportunism: and
in those moments, which, in regard to the declaration of character,
may surely be held to counterbalance whole months spent in tactical
shifts and diplomatic wiles, he was capable of soaring to heights of
imaginative reverence. Such an episode, lighting up for us the
recesses of his mind, occurred during his voyage to Egypt. The
_savants_ on board his ship, "L'Orient," were discussing one of those
questions which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter
in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental
dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim
of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being
discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the
midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: "Very
ingenious, sirs, but who made all that?" As a retort to the
tongue-fencers, what could be better? The appeal away from words to
the star-studded canopy was irresistible: it affords a signal proof of
what Carlyle has finely called his "instinct for nature" and his
"ineradicable feeling for reality." This probably was the true man,
lying deep under his Moslem shifts and Concordat bargainings.

That there was a tinge of superstition in Bonaparte's nature, such as
usually appears in gifted scions of a coast-dwelling family, cannot be
denied;[101] but his usual attitude towards religion was that of the
political mechanician, not of the devotee, and even while professing
the forms of fatalistic beli