Often, at Saint-Cloud, he keeps the counselors of state from nine o'clock in the morning until five in the evening, with fifteen minutes' intermission, and seems no more fatigued at the close of the session than when it began." During the night sessions "many of the members succumb through weariness, while the Minister of War falls asleep"; he gives them a shake and wakes them up, "Come, come, citizens, let us bestir ourselves, it is only two o'clock and we must earn the money the French people pay us." Consul or Emperor,[1150] "he demands of each minister an account of the smallest details: It is not rare to see them leaving the council room overcome with fatigue, due to the long interrogatories to which he has subjected them; he appears not to have noticed, and talks about the day's work simply as a relaxation which has scarcely given his mind exercise." And what is 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,[1151] 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.