"Make professors (regents) for me," said he one day in connection with the Ecole normale, "and not litterateurs, wits or seekers or inventors in any branch of knowledge." In like manner says he again,[6223] "I do not approve of the regulation requiring a man to be bachelor (bachelier) in the sciences before he can be a bachelor in the medical faculty; medicine is not an exact and positive science, but a science of guess and observation.

I should place more confidence in a doctor who had not studied the exact sciences than in one who possessed them.
I preferred M.Corvisart to M.Halle, because M.Halle belongs to the Institute.

M.Corvisart does not even know what two equal triangles are.
The medical student should not be diverted from hospital practice, from dissections and studies relating to his trade." There is the same subordination of science to the professions, the same concern for immediate or near application, the same utilitarian tendency to aim at a public function or a private career, the same contraction of studies in the law school, in that order of truths of which Montesquieu, a Frenchman, fifty years before, had first seized the entire body, marked the connections and delineated the chart.

At issue are the laws and the "spirit of laws," unwritten or written, by which diverse human societies live, of whatever form, extent and kind,--the State, commune, Church, school, army, agricultural or industrial workshop, tribe or family.

These, existing or fossilized, are realities, open to observation like plants or animals.