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Updated: June 13, 2025
Constant in his hatred of deliberative assemblies, which he had often termed collections of babblers, ideologists, and phrasemongers, Napoleon, on his return to Paris, suppressed the Tribunate, which had been an annoyance to him ever since the first day of his elevation.
It is tyranny only whether individual or popular that utters its feeble sneers at the ideologists, as if mankind were brutes to whom instincts were all in all and ideas nothing. Where intellect and justice are enslaved by that unholy trinity Force; Dogma, and Ignorance the tendency of governments, and of those subjected to them, must of necessity be retrograde and downward.
Constant in his hatred of deliberative assemblies, which he had often termed collections of babblers, ideologists, and phrasemongers, Napoleon, on his return to Paris, suppressed the Tribunate, which had been an annoyance to him ever since the first day of his elevation.
As to the cultivated and intelligent liberals of 1789, he consigns them with a word to the place where they belong; they are "ideologists"; in other words, their pretended knowledge is mere drawing-room prejudice and the imagination of the study. "Lafayette is a political ninny," the eternal "dupe of men and of things."
The guiding principle of the ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders in 1794.
Living cheek by jowl with us, there are hundreds and thousands of persons who are ruining their minds by a kind of literary debauch. They endeavour to follow on the footsteps of the specialists; they struggle to learn a little of everything, and they end by knowing nothing. They commit mental suicide: and, although no disgrace attaches to this species of self-murder, yet disgrace is not the only thing we have to fear in the course of our brief pilgrimage. We emerge from eternity, we plunge into eternity; we have but a brief space to poise ourselves in the light ere we drop into the gulf of doom, and our duty is to be miserly over every moment and every faculty that is vouchsafed to us. The essentials of thought and knowledge are contained in a very few books, and the most toilsome drudge who ever preached a sermon, drove a rivet, or swept a floor may become perfectly educated by exercising a wise self-restraint, by resolutely refusing to be guided by the ambitious advice of airy cultured persons, and by mastering a few good books to the last syllable. Mr. Ruskin is one of our greatest masters of English, and his supremacy as a thinker is sufficiently indicated by Mazzini's phrase "Ruskin has the most analytic mind in Europe." No truer word was ever spoken than this last, for, in spite of his dogmatic disposition, Mr. Ruskin does utter the very transcendencies of wisdom. Now this glorious writer of English, this subtlest of thinkers, was rigidly kept to a very few books until he reached manhood. Under the eye of his mother he went six times through the Bible, and learned most of the Book by heart. This in itself was a discipline of the most perfect kind, for the translators of the Bible had command of the English tongue at the time when it was at its noblest. Then Mr. Ruskin read Pope again and again, thus unconsciously acquiring the art of expressing meaning with a complete economy of words. In the evening he heard the Waverley Novels read aloud until he knew the plot, the motive, the ultimate lesson of all those beautiful books. When he was fourteen years old, he read one or two second-rate novels over and over again; and even this was good training, in that it showed him the faults to be avoided. Before his boyhood was over, he read his Byron with minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early training? The use and purport of it all are plain enough to us, for we see that the gentle student's intellect was kept clear of lumber; his thoughts were not battened down under mountains of other men's, and, when he wanted to fix an idea, he was not obliged to grope for it in a rubbish heap of second-hand notions. Of course he read many other authors by slow degrees; but, until his manhood came, his range was restricted. The flawless perfection of his work is due mainly to his mother's sedulous insistence on perfection within strict bounds. Again, and keeping still to authors, Charles Dickens knew very little about books. His keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of the world's forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber. He read Fielding, Smollett, Gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of Tennyson's poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of looking at things for himself without interposing the dimness that falls like a darkening shadow on a mind that is crammed with the conceptions of other folk. Look at the practical men! Nasmyth scarcely read at all; Napoleon always spoke of literary persons as "ideologists;" Stephenson was nineteen before he mastered his Bible; Mahomet was totally uneducated; Gordon was content with the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress," and Thomas
Constant in his hatred of deliberative assemblies, which he had often termed collections of babblers, ideologists, and phrasemongers, Napoleon, on his return to Paris, suppressed the Tribunate, which had been an annoyance to him ever since the first day of his elevation.
The advocates of liberty, and of progress, are "ideologists;" a word of contempt often in his mouth; "Necker is an ideologist:" "Lafayette is an ideologist." An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that, "if you would succeed, you must not be too good."
But his work and this is the important point for us helped to diffuse the idea, which the ideologists were diffusing on very different lines that human history has been a progressive development. He had not fallen under the glamour of German idealism, and his results have more affinity with Vico's than with Hegel's.
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