At this point Buonaparte's apprentice years may be said to have ended: he was virtually the man he remained to the end. A Corsican by origin, he retained the national sensibility and an enormous power of endurance both physical and intellectual, together with the dogged persistence found in the medieval Corsicans. He was devoted with primitive virtue to his family and his people, but was willing to sacrifice the latter, at least, to his ambition. His moral sense, having never been developed by education, and, worse than that, having been befogged by the extreme sensibility of Rousseau and by the chaos of the times which that prophet had brought to pass, was practically lacking. Neither the hostility of his father to religion, nor his own experiences with the Jesuits, could, however, entirely eradicate a superstition which passed in his mind for faith. Sometimes he was a scoffer, as many with weak convictions are; but in general he preserved a formal and outward respect for the Church. He was, however, a stanch opponent of Roman centralization and papal pretensions. His theoretical education had been narrow and one-sided; but his reading and his authorship, in spite of their superficial and desultory character, had given him certain large and fairly definite conceptions of history and politics. But his practical education! What a polishing and sharpening he had had against the revolving world moving many times faster then than in most ages! He was an adept in the art of civil war, for he had been not merely an interested observer, but an active participant in it during five years in two countries. Long the victim of wiles more secret than his own, he had finally grown most wily in diplomacy; an ambitious politician, his pulpy principles were republican in their character so far as they had any tissue or firmness.