worse, "it often happens that on returning home they find a dozen of
his letters requiring immediate response, for which the whole night
scarcely suffices." The quantity of facts he is able to retain and
store away, the quantity of ideas he elaborates and produces, seems to
surpass human capacity, and this insatiable, inexhaustible, unmovable
brain thus keeps on working uninterruptedly for thirty years.

Through another result of the same mental organization, Napoleon's
brain is never unproductive; that's today our great danger. - During
the past three hundred years we have more and more lost sight of the
exact and direct meaning of things. Subject to the constraints of a
conservative, complex, and extended educational system we study

* the symbols of objects rather than on the objects themselves;
* instead of the ground itself, a map of it;
* instead of animals struggling for existence,[51] nomenclatures and
classifications, or, at best, stuffed specimens displayed in a museum;
* instead of persons who feel and act, statistics, codes, histories,
literatures, and philosophies;

in short, printed words. Even worse, abstract terms, which from
century to century have become more abstract and therefore further
removed from experience, more difficult to understand, less adaptable
and more deceptive, especially in all that relates to human life and
society. Here, due to the growth of government, to the multiplication
of services, to the entanglement of interests, the object,
indefinitely enlarged and complex, now eludes our grasp. Our vague,
incomplete, incorrect idea of it badly corresponds with it, or does
not correspond at all. In nine minds out of ten, or perhaps ninety-
nine out of a hundred, it is but little more than a word. The others,