one survived in the Museum of Natural History,
with its thirteen chairs, and the College of France, with nineteen. But
here, too, the audience is sparse, mixed, disunited and unsatisfactory;
the lectures being public and free, everybody enters the room and leaves
as he pleases during the lecture. Many of the attendants are idlers who
seek distraction in the tone and gestures of the professors, or birds
of passage who come there to warm themselves in winter and to sleep in
summer. Nevertheless, two or three foreigners and half a dozen Frenchmen
thoroughly learn Arabic or zoology from Silvestre de Sacy, Cuvier or
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. That answers the purpose; they are quite enough,
and, elsewhere too in the other branches of knowledge. All that is
required is a small elite of special and eminent men--about one hundred
and fifty in France in the various sciences,[6232] and, behind them,
provisionally, two or three hundred others, their possible successors,
competent and designated beforehand by their works and celebrity to fill
the gaps made by death in the titular staff as these occur. The latter,
representatives of science and of literature, provide the indispensable
adornment of the modern State. But, in addition to this, they are the
depositaries of a new force, which more and more becomes the principal
guide, the influential regulator and even the innermost motor of human
action. Now, in a centralized State, no important force must be left to
itself; Napoleon is not a man to tolerate the independence of this one,
allowing it to act apart and outside of limitations; he knows how to
utilize it and turn it to his own advantage. He has already grasped
another force of the same order but more ancient, and, in the same way,
and with equal skill, he also takes hold of the new one.

In effect, alongside of religious authority, based on divine revelation
and belonging to the clergy, there is now a lay authority founded on
human reason, which is exercised by scientists, erudites, scholars and
philosophers. They too, in their way, form a clergy, since they
frame creeds and teach a faith; only, their preparatory and dominant
disposition is not trust and a docile mind, but distrust and the need
of critical examination. With them, nearly every source of belief is
suspicious. At bottom, among the ways of acquiring knowledge, they
accept but two, the most direct, the simplest, the best tested, and
again on condition that one proves