and become the Colossus which the ancient plants, equally deep-rooted
and certainly as absorbent, but born in a less friable soil and more
crowded together, could not provide.

II. The Leader and Statesman

Intelligence during the Italian Renaissance and at the present day. -
Integrity of Bonaparte's mental machinery. - Flexibility, force, and
tenacity of his attention. - Another difference between Napoleon's
intellect and that of his contemporaries. - He thinks objects and not
words. - His antipathy to Ideology. - Little or no literary or
philosophical education. - Self-taught through direct observation and
technical instruction. - His fondness for details. - His inward
vision of physical objects and places. - His mental portrayal of
positions, distances, and quantities.

"The human plant," said Alfieri, "is in no country born more vigorous
than in Italy"; and never, in Italy, was it so vigorous as from 1300
to 1500, from the contemporaries of Dante down to those of Michael
Angelo, Caesar Borgia, Julius II., and Macchiavelli.[43] The first
distinguishing mark of a man of those times is the soundness of his
mental instrument. Nowadays, after three hundred years of service,
ours has lost somewhat of its moral fiber, sharpness, and versatility:
usually the compulsory specialization has caused it to become lop-
sided making it unfit for other purposes. What's more, the increase
in ready-made ideas and clichés and acquired methods incrusts it and
reduces its scope to a sort of routine. Finally, it is exhausted by
an excess of intellectual activity and diminished by the continuity of
sedentary habits. It is just the opposite with those impulsive minds
of uncorrupted blood and of a new stock. - Roederer, a competent and