the
obligations it imposes on magistrates, lawyers and ministerial officials
not to act until obtaining this or that grade,--

such is what the interest of society demands and what it may exact.
According to this principle, the State creates special schools, (today
in 1998 called Grande Ecoles[6221]), and, through the indirect monopoly
which it possesses, it fills them with listeners; henceforth, these are
to furnish the youth of France with superior education.[6222]

From the start, Napoleon, as logician, with his usual lucidity and
precision, lays it down that they shall be strictly practical and
professional. "Make professors (regents) for me," said he one day
in connection with the Ecole normale, "and not litterateurs, wits or
seekers or inventors in any branch of knowledge." In like manner says he
again,[6223]

"I do not approve of the regulation requiring a man to be bachelor
(bachelier) in the sciences before he can be a bachelor in the medical
faculty; medicine is not an exact and positive science, but a science
of guess and observation. I should place more confidence in a doctor
who had not studied the exact sciences than in one who possessed them.
I preferred M. Corvisart to M. Halle, because M. Halle belongs to the
Institute. M. Corvisart does not even know what two equal triangles are.
The medical student should not be diverted from hospital practice, from
dissections and studies relating to his trade."

There is the same subordination of science to the professions, the same
concern for immediate or near application, the same utilitarian tendency
to aim at a public function or a private career, the same contraction of
studies in the law school, in that order of truths of which Montesquieu,
a Frenchman, fifty years before, had first seized the entire body,
marked the connections and delineated the chart. At issue are the laws
and the "spirit of laws," unwritten or written, by which diverse human
societies live, of whatever form, extent and kind,--the State, commune,
Church, school, army, agricultural or industrial workshop, tribe
or family. These, existing or fossilized, are realities, open to
observation like plants or animals. One may, the same as with animals
and plants, observe them, describe them, compare them together, follow
their history from first to last, study their organization, classify
them in natural groups, disengage the distinctive and dominant
characteristics in each, note its ambient su