comprehensive and curious mind aspires. "I know nothing of the civil
code," said another professor, older and in closer proximity with the
primitive institution, "I teach only the Code Napoleon." Accordingly,
with his clear-sightedness and his practical and graphic imagination,
Napoleon could perceive in advance the future and certain products of
his machine, the magistrates in their bonnets, seated or standing in
their court-rooms, with the lawyers in their robes facing them pleading,
and, farther on, the great consumers of stamped papers in their bureaus
encumbered with files of documents with the attorneys and notaries
engaged in drawing them up; elsewhere, prefects, sub-prefects, prefect
councilors, government commissioners and other officials, all at work
and doing pretty well, all of them useful organs but mere organs of the
law. The chances were small, fewer than under the ancient regime, for
an erudite and independent thinker, a Montesquieu, to issue from that
school.

III. On Science, Reason and Truth.

Crowning point of the university edifice.--Faith based on
criticism.--How it binds men together and forms a lay
Church.--Social power of this Church.--Scientific and
literary authorities.--How Napoleon enrolls them.--The
Institute, an appendage of the State.

Everywhere else, the direction and reach of superior instruction are
similar. In the Faculties of Science and Literature, much more than in
the Faculties of Medicine and of Law, the principal employment of the
professors is the awarding of grades.--They likewise confer the titles
of bachelor, licentiate and doctor; but the future bachelor is not
prepared by them; the lycee furnishes him for the examination, fresh
from its benches; they have then no audience but future licentiates,
that is to say a few schoolmasters and a licentiate at long intervals
who wants to become a doctor in order to mount upward into the
university hierarchy. Besides these, occasional amateurs, nearly all of
ripe age, who wish to freshen their classic souvenirs, and idlers who
want to kill time, fill the lecture-room. To prevent empty benches the
lecture course becomes a conference d'Athenee, which is pleasant enough
or sufficiently general to interest or, at least, not to repel people
of society.[6231] Two establishments remain for teaching true science to
the workers who wish to acquire it; who, in the widespread wreck of the
ancient regime have al