if they desire some significant indication of what society actually is
beyond the teachings of books, require ten or fifteen years of close
observation and study to re-think the phrases with which these have
filled their memory, to interpret them anew, to make clear their
meaning, to get at and verify their sense, to substitute for the more
or less empty and indefinite term the fullness and precision of a
personal impression. We have seen how ideas of Society, State,
Government, Sovereignty, Rights, Liberty, the most important of all
ideas, were, at the close of the eighteenth century, curtailed and
falsified; how, in most minds, simple verbal reasoning combined them
together in dogmas and axioms; what an offspring these metaphysical
simulacra gave birth to, how many lifeless and grotesque abortions,
how many monstrous and destructive chimeras. There is no place for
any of these fanciful dreams in the mind of Bonaparte; they cannot
arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial
phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to
disgust.[52] That which was then called ideology, is his particular
bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation, but still more
through an instinctive demand for what is real, as a practical man and
statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great Catherine, "that he
is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide, which is ticklish."
Every idea entertained by him had its origin in his personal
observation, and he used his own personal observations to control
them.

If books are useful to him it is to suggest questions, which he never
answers but through his own experience. He has read only a little,
and hastily;[53] his classical education is rudimentary; in the way of
Latin, he remained in the lower class. The instruction he got at the
Military Academy as well as at Brienne was below mediocrity, while,