or of a group of
people, the real motives, permanent or temporary, which drive or curb
men in general or this or that man in particular, the incentives to be
employed, the kind and degree of pressure to be employed. This central
faculty rules all the others, and in the art of mastering Man his genius
is found supreme.

III. His acute Understanding of Others.

His psychological faculty and way of getting at the thought
and feeling of others.--His self-analysis.--How he imagines
a general situation by selecting a particular case,
imagining the invisible interior by deducting from the
visible exterior.--Originality and superiority of his style
and discourse.--His adaptation of these to his hearers and
to circumstances.--His notation and calculation of
serviceable motives.

No faculty is more precious for a political engineer; for the forces he
acts upon are never other than human passions. But how, except
through divination, can these passions, which grow out of the deepest
sentiments, be reached? How, save by conjecture, can forces be estimated
which seem to defy all measurement? On this dark and uncertain ground,
where one has to grope one's way, Napoleon moves with almost absolute
certainty; he moves promptly. First of all, he studies himself; indeed,
to find one's way into another's soul requires, preliminarily, that one
should dive deep into one's own.[1161]

"I have always delighted in analysis," said he, one day, "and should I
ever fall seriously in love I would take my sentiment to pieces. Why and
How are such important questions one cannot put them to one's self too
often."

"It is certain," writes an observer, "that he, of all men, is the one
who has most meditated on the why which controls human actions."

His method, that of the experimental sciences, consists in testing every
hypothesis or deduction by some positive fact, observed by him under
definite conditions; a physical force being ascertained and accurately
measured through the deviation of a needle, or through the rise and
fall of a fluid, this or that invisible moral force can likewise be
ascertained and approximately measured through some emotional sign, some
decisive manifestation, consisting of a certain word, tone, or gesture.
It is these words, tones, and gestures which he dwells on; he detects
inward sentiments by the outward expression; he figures to himself
the internal by the external, by s