The chances were small, fewer than under the ancient regime, for an erudite and independent thinker, a Montesquieu, to issue from that school.
III.

On Science, Reason and Truth.
Crowning point of the university edifice .-- Faith based on criticism .-- How it binds men together and forms a lay Church .-- Social power of this Church .-- Scientific and literary authorities .-- How Napoleon enrolls them .-- The Institute, an appendage of the State.
Everywhere else, the direction and reach of superior instruction are similar.

In the Faculties of Science and Literature, much more than in the Faculties of Medicine and of Law, the principal employment of the professors is the awarding of grades .-- They likewise confer the titles of bachelor, licentiate and doctor; but the future bachelor is not prepared by them; the lycee furnishes him for the examination, fresh from its benches; they have then no audience but future licentiates, that is to say a few schoolmasters and a licentiate at long intervals who wants to become a doctor in order to mount upward into the university hierarchy.

Besides these, occasional amateurs, nearly all of ripe age, who wish to freshen their classic souvenirs, and idlers who want to kill time, fill the lecture-room.

To prevent empty benches the lecture course becomes a conference d'Athenee, which is pleasant enough or sufficiently general to interest or, at least, not to repel people of society.[6231] Two establishments remain for teaching true science to the workers who wish to acquire it; who, in the widespread wreck of the ancient regime have alone survived in the Museum of Natural History, with its thirteen chairs, and the College of France, with nineteen.