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 some facial appearance, some telling attitude, some brief and topical scene, by such specimen and shortcuts, so well chosen and detailed that they provide a summary of the innumerable series of analogous cases.

In this way, the vague, fleeting object is suddenly arrested, brought to bear, and then gauged and weighed, like some impalpable gas collected and kept in a graduated transparent glass tube .-- Accordingly, at the Council of State, while the others, either jurists or administrators, see abstractions, articles of the law and precedents, he sees people as they are--the Frenchman, the Italian, the German; that of the peasant, the workman, the bourgeois, the noble, the returned emigre,[1162] the soldier, the officer and the functionary--everywhere the individual man as he is, the man who plows, manufactures, fights, marries, brings forth children, toils, enjoys himself, and dies .-- Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the dull, grave arguments advanced by the wise official editor, and Napoleon's own words caught on the wing, at the moment, vibrating and teeming with illustrations and imagery.[1163] Apropos of divorce, the principle of which he wishes to maintain: "Consult, now, national manners and customs.