Among these may be mentioned the church of St. Jacques, of the 13th century; St. Antoine, of the 15th and 16th; the town-house, a picturesque building of the late Gothic style, dating from the 16th; the theatre; and the royal palace, which is one of the most extensive and magnificent structures of the kind in France. It was erected mainly under Louis XV. and XVI., but large additions have been made in more recent times. The gardens are beautifully laid out, and in the neighborhood is the famous forest of Compiègne, which covers an area of 30,000 acres, and includes the site of the camp constructed by Cæsar in his campaign against the Bellovaci. The town is the seat of a civil and a commercial tribunal, and has a communal college, a public library, and a museum in the town-hall. The principal manufactures are hosiery, muslins, ropes, and wooden wares; and there is a fair trade in corn and wood. Population in 1872, 11,859 in the town, and 12,281 in the commune. who governed the Church during the time of Pope Innocent X., which was from the year 1644 to 1655 (1667), and A Translation from the French of the Jesuits' Intrigues (1669). COMTE, AUGUSTE. the most eminent and important of that interesting group of thinkers whom the overthrow of old institutions in France turned towards social specu lation. Vastly superior as he was to men like De Maistre on the one hand, and to men like Saint Simon or Fourier on the other, as well in scientific acquisitions as in mental capacity, still the aim and interest of all his thinking was also theirs, namely, the renovation of the conditions of the social union. If, however, we classify him, not thus according to aim, but according to method, then he takes rank among men of a very different type from these. What distinguishes him in method from his contemporaries is his discernment that the social order cannot be transformed until all the theoretic conceptions that belong to it have been rehandled in a scientific spirit, and maturely gather Compiègne, or, as it is called in the Latin chronicles, Com-ed up into a systematic whole along with the rest of our pendium, seems originally to have been a hunting-lodge of the early Frankish kings. It was enriched by Charles the Bald with two castles, and a Benedictine abbey dedicated to Saint Corneille, the monks of which retained down to the 18th century the privilege of acting for three days as lords of Compiègne, with full power to release prisoners, condemn the knowledge. This presiding doctrine connects Comte with the social thinkers of the 18th century,-indirectly with Montesquieu, directly with Turgot, and more closely than either with Condorcet, of whom he was accustomed to speak as his philosophic father. Isidore-Auguste-Marie - François-Xavier guilty, and even inflict sentence of death. It was in Com-Comte was born in January, 1798, at Montpel- Youth. piègne that Louis the Debonnaire was deposed in 833; and at lier, where his father was a receiver-general of taxes for the siege of the town in 1430, Joan of Arc was taken prisoner the district. He was sent for his earliest instruction to the by the English. The abbey church received the dust of Louis II., Louis V., and Hugh the Great; and for a long time it had school of the town, and in 1814 was admitted to the École the distinction of possessing the oldest organ in France, a gift Polytechnique. His youth was marked by a constant wilfrom Constantine Copronymus to Pepin the Short. In 1624 the lingness to rebel against merely official authority; to gentown gave its name to a treaty of alliance concluded by Riche- uine excellence, whether moral or intellectual, he was lieu with the Dutch; and it was in the palace that Louis XV. always ready to pay unbounded deference. That strengave welcome to Marie Antoinette, that Napoleon I. received uous application which was one of his most remarkable Marie Louise of Austria, that Louis XVIII. entertained the gifts in manhood showed itself in his youth, and his appliEmperor Alexander of Russia, and that Leopold, king of the cation was backed or inspired by superior intelligence and Belgians, was married to the Princess Louise. Under Napoleon III. it was the annual resort of the court during the hunt-aptness. After he had been two years at the Ecole Polying season, and thus became the scene of many a remarkable assembly. In 1871 the town was an important post of communication between France and Germany. COMPOSTELLA, a city of Spain in the Galician province of Coruña, more frequently called Santiago, in honor of its patron saint, St. James, whose shrine was long one of the principal places of pilgrimage in Christendom. It gives its name to one of the four military orders of Spain, which rank as follows:-Compostella, Calatrava, Alcantara, and Manresa. See SANTIAGO. technique he took a foremost part in a mutinous demonstration against one of the masters; the school was broken up, and Comte like the other scholars was sent home. To the great dissatisfaction of his parents, he resolved to return to Paris (1816), and to earn his living there by giving lessons in mathematics. Benjamin Franklin was the youth's idol at this moment. "I seek to imitate the modern Socrates," he wrote to a school friend, “not in talents, but in way of living. You know that at five and twenty he formed the design of becoming perfectly wise, and that he fulfilled his design. I have dared to undertake the same thing, though I am not yet twenty." Though Comte's character and aims were as far removed as possible from Franklin's type, neither Franklin nor any man that ever lived could surpass him in the heroic tenacity with which, in the face of a thousand obstacles, he pursued his own ideal of a vocation. COMPTON, HENRY (1632-1713), bishop of London, was the youngest son of the earl of Northampton. After the restoration of Charles II. he became cornet in a regiment of horse, but he soon quitted the army for the church. He was made bishop of Oxford in 1674, and in the following year was translated to the see of London. He was For a moment circumstances led him to think of seeking also appointed a member of the Privy Council, and ina career in America, but a friend who preceded him thither trusted with the education of the two princesses-Mary warned him of the purely practical spirit that prevailed in and Anne. Compton showed a liberality most unusual at the new country. "If Lagrange were to come to the United the time to Protestant dissenters, whom he wished to re- States, he could only earn his livelihood by turning land unite with the established church. He held several con- surveyor." So Comte remained in Paris, living as he best ferences on the subject with the clergy of his diocese; and could on something less than £80 a year, and hoping, in the hope of influencing candid minds by means of the when he took the trouble to break his meditations upon opinions of unbiassed foreigners, he obtained letters treat-greater things by hopes about himself, that he might by ing of the question (since printed at the end of Stillingfleet's Unreasonableness of Separation), from Le Moyne, professor of divinity at Leyden, and the famous French Protestant divine, Claude. But to Roman Catholicism he was strongly opposed. On the accession of James II. he consequently lost his seat in the council and his deanery in the Chapel Royal; and for his firmness in refusing to suspend Dr. Sharpe, whose writings against Popery had rendered him obnoxious to the king, he was himself suspended. At the Revolution, Compton embraced the cause of William and Mary; he performed the ceremony of their co.onation; his old position was restored to him; and, among other appointments, he was chosen as one of the commissioners for revising the liturgy. During the reign of Anne he remained a member of the Privy Council, and he was one of the commissioners appointed to arrange the terms of the union of England and Scotland; but, to his bitter disappointment, his claims to the primacy were twice passed over. He published, besides several theological works, A Translalion from the Italian of the Life of Donna Olympia Maladichini, and by obtain an appointment as mathematical master in a school. A friend procured him a situation as tutor in the house of Casimir Périer. The salary was good, but the duties were too miscellaneous, and what was still worse, there was an end of the delicious liberty of the garret. After a short experience of three weeks Comte returned to neediness and contentment. He was not altogether without the young man's appetite for pleasure; yet when he was only nineteen we find him wondering, amid the gayeties of the carnival of 1817, how a gavotte or a minuet could make people forget that thirty thousand human beings around them had barely a morsel to eat. Hardship in youth has many drawbacks, but it has the immense advantage over academic ease of making the student's interest in men real, and not merely literary. Towards 1818 Comte became associated as Sinion. friend and disciple with a man who was des- Influence of the most important set of memoirs in a language that | is so incomparably rich in memoirs. He was now nearly sixty, and if he had not gained a serious reputation, he had at least excited the curiosity and interest of his contemporaries by the social eccentricities of his life, by the multitude of his schemes and devices, and by the fantastic ingenuity of his political ideas. Saint Simon's most characteristic faculty was an exuberant imagination, working in the sphere of real things. Scientific discipline did nothing for him; he had never undergone it, and he never felt its value. He was an artist in social construction; and if right ideas, or the suggestion of right ideas, sometimes came into his head, about history, about human progress, about a stable polity, such ideas were not the products of trains of ordered reasoning; they were the intuitional glimpses of the poet, and consequently as they professed to be in real matter, even the right ideas were as often as not accompanied by wrong ones. The young Comte, now twenty, was enchanted by the philosophic veteran. In after years he so far forgot himself as to write of Saint Simon as a depraved quack, and to deplore his connection with him as purely mischievous. While the connection lasted he thought very differently. Saint Simon is described as the most estimable and lovable of men, and the most delightful in his relations; he is the worthiest of philosophers. Even after the association had come to an end, and at the very moment when Comte was congratulating himself on having thrown off the yoke, he honestly admits that Saint Simon's influence has been of powerful service in his philosophic education. "I certainly," he writes to his most intimate friend, "am under great personal obligations to Saint Simon; that is to say, he helped in a powerful degree to launch me in the philosophical direction that I have now definitely marked out for myself, and that I shall follow without looking back for the rest of my life." Even if there were no such unmistakable expressions as these, the most cursory glance into Saint Simon's writings is enough to reveal the thread of connection between the ingenious visionary and the systematic thinker. We see the debt, and we also see that when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint Simon in intellectual grasp and vigor and coherence. As high a degree of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as Molière and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art. In philosophy the conditions are not different. Il faut prendre son bien où on le trouve. It is no detriment to Comte's fame that some of the ideas which he recombined and incorporated in a great philosophical structure had their origin in ideas that were produced almost at random in the incessant fermentation of Saint Simon's brain. Comte is in no true sense a follower of Saint Simon, but it was undoubtedly Saint Simon who launched him, to take Comte's own word, by suggesting to his strong and penetrating mind the two starting points of what grew into the Comtist system-first, that political phenomena are as capable of being grouped under laws as ther phenomena; and second, that the true destination of philosophy must be social, and the true object of the thinker must be the reorganization of the moral, religious, and political systems. We can readily see what an impulse these far-reaching conceptions would give to Comte's meditations. There were conceptions of less importance than these, in which it was impossible not to feel that it was Saint Simon's wrong or imperfect idea that put his young admirer on the track to a right and perfected idea. The subject is not worthy of further discussion. That Comte would have performed some great intellectual achievement, if Saint Simon had never been born, is certain. It is hardly less certain that the great achievement which he did actually perform was originally set in motion by Saint Simon's conversation, though it was afterwards directly filiated with the fertile speculations of Turgot and Condorcet. Comte thought almost as meanly of Plato as he did of Saint Simon, and he considered Aristotle the prince of all true thinkers; yet their vital difference about Ideas did not prevent Aristotle from calling Plato master. After six years the differences between the old and the young philosopher grew too marked for friendship. Comte began to fret under Saint Simon's pretensions to be his director. Saint Simon, on the other hand, perhaps began to feel uncomfortably conscious of the superiority of his disciple. The occasion of the breach between them (1824) was an attempt on Saint Simon's part to print a production of Comte's as if it were in some sort connected with Saint Simon's schemes of social reorganization. Comte was never a man to quarrel by halves, and not only was the breach not repaired, but long afterwards Comte, as we have said, with painful ungraciousness took to calling the encourager of his youth by very hard names. In 1835 Comte married. His marriage was one of those of which "magnanimity owes no Marriage. account to prudence," and it did not turn out prosperously. His family were strongly Catholic and royalist, and they were outraged by his refusal to have the marriage performed other than civilly. They consented, however, to receive his wife, and the pair went on a visit to Montpellier. Madame Comte conceived a dislike to the circle she found there, and this was the too early beginning of dis putes which lasted for the remainder of their union. In the year of his marriage we find Comte writing to the most intimate of his correspondents:-"I have nothing left but to concentrate my whole moral existence in my intellectual work, a precious but inadequate compensation; and so I must give up, if not the most dazzling, still the sweetest part of my happiness." We cannot help admiring the heroism which cherishes great ideas in the midst of petty miseries, and intrepidly throws all squalid interruptions into the background which is their true place. Still, we may well suppose that the sordid cares that come with want of money made a harmonious life none the more easy. Comte tried to find pupils to board with him, but only one pupil came, and he was soon sent away for lack of companions. "I would rather spend an evening," wrote the needy enthusiast, "in solving a difficult question, than in running after some empty-headed and consequential millionaire in search of a pupil." A little money was earned by an occasional article in Le Producteur, in which he began to expound the philosophic ideas that were now maturing in his mind. He announced a course of lectures (1826), which it was hoped would bring money as well as fame, and which were to be the first dogmatic exposition of the Positive Philosophy. A friend had said to him, "You talk too freely, your ideas are getting abroad, and other people use them without giving you the credit; put your ownership on record." The lectures were intended to do this among other things, and they attracted hearers so eminent as Humboldt the cosmologist, as Poinsot the geometer, as Blainville the physiologist. Serious Unhappily, after the third lecture of the course, Comte had a severe attack of cerebral illness. derangement, brought on by intense and prolonged meditation, acting on a system that was already irritated by the chagrin of domestic failure. He did not recover his health for more than a year, and as soon as convalescence set in he was seized by so profound a melancholy at the disaster which had thus overtaken him, that he threw himself into the Seine. Fortunately he was rescued, and the shock did not stay his return to mental soundness. One incident of this painful episode is worth mentioning. Lamennais, then in the height of his Catholic exaltation, persuaded Comte's mother to insist on her son being married with the religious ceremony, and as the younger Madame Comte apparently did not resist, the rite was duly performed, in spite of the fact that the unfortunate man was at the time neither more nor less than raving mad. To such shocking conspiracies against common sense and decency does ecclesiastical zealotry bring even good men like Lamennais. On the other hand, philosophic assailants of Comtism have not always resisted the temptation to recall the circumstance that its founder was once out of his mind,—an unworthy and irrelevant device, that cannot be excused even by the provocation of Comte's own occasional acerbity. As has been justly said, if Newton once suffered a cerebral attack without on that account forfeiting our veneration for the Principia, Comte may have suffered in the same way, and still not have forfeited our respect for what is good in the systems of Positive Philosophy and Positive Polity. In 1828 the lectures were renewed, and in Official 1830 was published the first volume of the work. Course of Positive Philosophy. The sketch and ground-plan of this great undertaking had appeared in 1826. The sixth and last volume was published in 1842 The twelve years covering the publication of the first of edifice, the author of this great contribution found himself in the midst of a very sea of small troubles. And they were troubles of that uncompensated kind that harass without elevating, and waste a man's spirit without softening or enlarging it. First, the jar of temperament between Comte and his wife had become so unbearable that they separated (1842). It is not expedient for strangers to attempt to allot blame in such cases, for it is impossible for strangers to know all the deciding circumstances. We need only say that in spite of one or two disadvantageous facts in her career which do not concern the public, Madame Comte seems to have uniformly comported herself towards her husband with an honorable solicitude for his wellbeing. Comte made her an annual allowance, and for some years after the separation they corresponded on friendly terms. Next in the list of the vexations that greeted Comte on emerging from the long tunnel of philosophizing, was a lawsuit with his publisher. The publisher had impertinently inserted in the sixth volume a protest against a certain foot-note, in which Comte had used some hard words about M. Arago. Comte threw himself into the suit with an energy worthy of Voltaire, and he won it. Third, and worst of all, he had prefixed a preface to the sixth volume, in which he deliberately went out of his way to rouse the active enmity of the very men on whom depended his annual re-election to the post of examiner for the Polytechnic School. The result of this perversity was that by and by he lost the appointment, and with it one-half of his very modest income. This was the occasion of an episode, which is of more than merely personal interest. Comte's two elaborate works were years of indefatigable | itorious toil devoted to the erection of a high philosophic toil, and they were the only portion of his life in which he enjoyed a certain measure, and that a very modest measure, of material prosperity. In 1833 he was appointed examiner of the boys in the various provincial schools who aspired to enter the École Polytechnique at Paris. This and two other engagements as a teacher of mathematics secured him an income of some £400 a year. He made M. Guizot, then Louis Philippe's minister, the important proposal to establish a chair of general history of the sciences. If there are four chairs, he argued, devoted to the history of philosophy, that is to say, the minute study of all sorts of dreams and aberrations through the ages, surely there ought to be at least one to explain the formation and progress of our real knowledge? This wise suggestion, which still remains to be acted upon, was at first welcomed, according to Comte's own account, by Guizot's philosophic instinct, and then repulsed by his "metaphysical rancor." Meanwhile Comte did his official work conscientiously, Borely as he grudged the time which it took from the execution of the great object of his thoughts. We cannot forbear to transcribe one delightful and touching trait in connection with this part of Comte's life. "I hardly know if even to you," he writes in the expansion of domestic confidence to his wife, "I dare disclose the sweet and softened feeling that comes over me when I find a young man whose examination is thoroughly satisfactory. Yes, though you may smile, the emotion would easily stir me to tears if I were not carefully on my guard." Such sympathy with youthful hope, in union with the industry and intelligence that are the only means of bringing the hope to fulfilment, shows that Comte's dry and austere manner veiled the fires of a generous social emotion. It was this which made the over-worked student take upon himself the burden of delivering every year from 1831 to 1848 a course of gratuitous lectures on astronomy for a popular audience. The social feeling that inspired this disinterested act showed itself in other ways. He suffered the penalty of imprisonment rather than serve in the national guard; his position was that though he would not take arms against the new monarchy of July, yet being a republican, he would take no oath to defend it. The only amusement that Comte permitted himself was a visit to the opera. In his youth he had been a play-goer, but he shortly came to the conclusion that tragedy is a stilted and bombastic art, and after a time comedy interested him no more than tragedy. For the opera he had a genuine passion, which he gratified as often as he could, until his means became too narrow to afford even that single relax ation. Of his manner and personal appearance we have the following account from one who was his pupil:-" Daily, as the clock struck eight on the horologue of the Luxembourg, while the ringing hammer on the bell was yet audible, the door of my room opened, and there entered a man, short, rather stout, almost what one might call sleek, freshly shaven, without vestige of whisker or moustache. He was invariably dressed in a suit of the most spotless black as if going to a dinner party; his white neck-cloth was fresh from the laundress's hands, and his hat shining like a racer's coat. He advanced to the arm-chair prepared for him in the centre of the writing-table, laid his hat on the left hand corner; his snuff-box was deposited on the same side beside the quire of paper placed in readiness for his use, and dipping the pen twice into the inkbottle, then bringing it to within an inch of his nose, to make sure it was properly filled, he broke silence: 'We have said that the chord AB,' &c. For three quarters of an hour he continued his demonstration, making short notes as he went on, to guide the listener in repeating the problem alone; then, taking up another cahier which lay beside him, he went over the written repetition of the former lesson. He explained, corrected, or commented till the clock struck nine; then, with the little finger of the right hand brushing from his coat and waistcoat the shower of superfluous snuff which had fallen on them, he pocketed his snuff-box, and resuming his hat, he as silently as when he came in made his exit by the door which I rushed to open for him." of Positive In 1842, as we have said, the last volume of Completion the Positive Philosophy was given to the public. Philosophy. Instead of that contentment which we like to picture as the reward of twelve years of mer Before 1842 Comte had been in correspond- J. S. Mill. ence with our distinguished countryman, J. S. Mill. Mr. Mill had been greatly impressed by Comte's philosophic ideas; he admits that his own System of Logic owes many valuable thoughts to Comte, and that, in the portion of that work which treats of the logic of the moral sciences, a radical improvement in the conceptions of logical method was derived from the Positive Philosophy. Their correspondence, which was extremely full and copious, and which we may hope will one day be made accessible to the public, turned principally upon the two great questions of the equality between men and women, and of the expediency and constitution of a sacerdotal or spiritual order. When Comte found himself straitened, he confided the entire circumstances to his English friend. As might be supposed by those who know the affec tionate anxiety with which Mr. Mill regarded the welfare of any one whom he believed to be doing good work in the world, he at once took pains to have Comte's loss of income made up to him, until Comte should have had time to repair that loss by his own endeavor. Mr. Mill persuaded Grote, Molesworth, and Raikes Currie to advance the sum of £240. At the end of the year (that is, in 1845) Comte had taken no steps to enable himself to dispense with the aid of the three Englishmen. Mr. Mill applied to them again, but with the exception of Grote, who sent a small sum, they gave Comte to understand that they expected him to earn his own living. Mr. Mill had suggested to Comte that he should write articles for the English periodicals, and expressed his own willingness to translate any such articles from the French. Comte at first fell in with this plan, but he speedily surprised and disconcerted Mr. Mill by boldly taking up the position of "high moral magistrate," accusing the three defaulting contributors of a scandalous falling away from righteousness and a high mind. Mr. Mill was chilled by these pretensions; they struck him as savoring of a totally unexpected charlatanry; and the correspondence came to an end. For Comte's position in the argument one feels that there is much to be said. If you have good reason for believing that a given thinker is doing work that will destroy the official system of science or philosophy, and if you desire its destruction, then you may fairly be asked to help to provide for him the same kind of material freedom that is secured to the professors and propagators of the official system by the state or by the universi- Question of ties. And if it is a fine thing for a man to leave money behind him in the shape of an endowment for the support of scientific teacher of whom he has never heard, why should it not be just as natural and as laudable to give money, while he is yet alive, to a teacher subsidy. cérébrale. whom he both knows and approves of? On the other Comte's manner is heavy, labored, monotonous, without hand, Grote and Molesworth might say that, for anything relief, and without light. There is now and then an enerthey could tell, they would find themselves to be helping getic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune; the the construction of a system of which they utterly disap- sentences are overloaded; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous proved. And, as things turned out, they would have been insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration perfectly justified in this serious apprehension. To have of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deaden done anything to make the production of the Positive Polity the effect beyond the endurance of all but the most resolute easier would have been no ground for anything but re- students. Only the profound and stimulating interest of morse to any of the three. It is just to Comte to remark much of the matter prevents one from thinking of Rivathat he always assumed that the contributors to the support rol's ill-natured remark upon Condorcet, that he wrote of a thinker should be in all essentials of method and with opium on a page of lead. The general effect is imdoctrine that thinker's disciples; aid from indifferent pressive, not by any virtues of style, for we do not discern persons he counted irrational and humiliating. But is an one, but by reason of the magnitude and importance of endowment ever a blessing to the man who receives it? the undertaking, and the visible conscientiousness and the The question is difficult to answer generally; in Comte's grasp with which it is executed. It is by sheer strength case there is reason in the doubts felt by Madame Comte of thought, by the vigorous perspicacity with which he as to the expediency of relieving the philosopher from the strikes the lines of cleavage of his subject, that he makes necessity of being in plain and business-like relations with his way into the mind of the reader; in the presence of gifts indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in the of this power we need not quarrel with an ungainly style. week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep Comte pursued one practice which ought to egoism within decent bounds, and they must be not only a be mentioned in connection with his personal Hygiène relief, but a wholesome corrective to the tendencies of con- history, the practice of what he styled hygiène centrated thinking on abstract subjects. cérébrale. After he had acquired what he considered to be Money. What finally happened was this. From 1845 a sufficient stock of material, and this happened before he to 1848 Comte lived as best he could, as well as had completed the Positive Philosophy, he abstained delibmade his wife her allowance, on an income of £200 a year. erately and scrupulously from reading newspapers, reWe need scarcely say that he was rigorously thrifty. His views, scientific transactions, and everything else whatlittle account books of income and outlay, with every item ever, except two or three poets (notably Dante) and the entered down to a few hours before his death, are accurate Imitatio Christi. It is true that his friends kept him inand neat enough to have satisfied an ancient Roman house- formed of what was going on in the scientific world. Still holder. In 1848, through no fault of his own, his salary this partial divorce of himself from the record of the social was reduced to £80. M. Littré and others, with Comte's and scientific activity of his time, though it may save a approval, published an appeal for subscriptions, and on thinker from the deplorable evils of dispersion, moral and the money thus contributed Comte subsisted for the re-intellectual, accounts in no small measure for the exagmaining nine years of his life. By 1852 the subsidy pro- gerated egoism, and the absence of all feeling for reality, duced as much as £200 a year. It is worth noticing, after which marked Comte's later days. the story we have told, that Mr. Mill was one of the subscribers, and that M. Littré continued his assistance after he had been driven from Comte's society by his high pontifical airs. We are sorry not to be able to record any similar trait of magnanimity on Comte's part. His character, admirable as it is for firmness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that make us love good men and pity bad ones. He is of the type of Brutus or of Cato-a model of austere fixity of purpose, but ungracious, domineering, and not quite free from petty bitterness. Literary method. If you seek to place yourself in sympathy with Comte it is best to think of him only as the intellectual worker, pursuing in uncomforted obscurity the laborious and absorbing task to which he had given up his whole life. His singularly conscientious fashion of elaborating his ideas made the mental strain more intense than even so exhausting a work as the abstract exposition of the principles of positive science need have been, if he had followed a more self-indulgent plan. He did not write down a word until he had first composed the whole matter in his mind. When he had thoroughly meditated every sentence, he sat down to write, and then, such was the grip of his memory, the exact order of his thoughts came back to him as if without an effort, and he wrote down precisely what he had intended to write, without the aid of a note or a memorandum, and without check or pause. For example, he began and completed in about six weeks a chapter in the Positive Philosophy (vol. v. ch. 55), which would fill forty of the large pages of this Encyclopædia. Even if his subject had been merely narrative or descriptive, this would be a very satisfactory piece of continuous production. When we reflect that the chapter in question is not narrative, but an abstract exposition of the guiding principles of the movements of several centuries, with many threads of complex thought running along side by side all through the speculation, then the circumstances under which it was reduced to literary form are really astonishing. It is hardly possible for a critic to share the admiration expressed by some of Comte's disciples for his style. We are not so unreasonable as to blame him for failing to make his pages picturesque or thrilling; we do not want sunsets and stars and roses and ecstasy; but there is a certain standard for the most serious and abstract subjects. When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's, Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Madame de Only one important incident in Comte's life now remains to be spoken of. In 1845 he made Vaux. the acquaintance of Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a lady whose husband had been sent to the galleys for life, and who was therefore, in all but the legal incidents of her position, a widow. Very little is known about her qualities. She wrote a little piece which Comte rated so preposterously as to talk about George Sand in the same sentence; it is in truth a flimsy performance, though it contains one or two gracious thoughts. There is true beauty in the saying "It is unworthy of a noble nature to diffuse its pain." Madame de Vaux's letters speak well for her good sense and good feeling, and it would have been better for Comte's later work if she had survived to exert a wholesome restraint on his exaltation. Their friendship had only lasted a year when she died (1846), but the period was long enough to give her memory a supreme ascendency in Comte's mind. Condillac, Joubert, Mill, and other eminent men have shown what the intellectual ascendency of a woman can be. Comte was as inconsolable after Madame de Vaux's death as D'Alembert after the death of Mademoiselle L'Espinasse. Every Wednesday afternoon he made a reverential pilgrimage to her tomb, and three times every day he invoked her memory in words of passionate expansion. His disciples believe that in time the world will reverence Comte's sentiments about Clotilde de Vaux as it reveres Dante's adoration of Beatrice-a parallel that Comte himself was the first to hit upon. It is no doubt the worst kind of cynicism to make a mock in a realistic vein of any personality that has set in motion the idealizing thaumaturgy of the affections. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet. Only an energetic and beautiful imagination, together with a mastery of the rhythm and swell of impassioned speech, can prevent an invitation to the public to hearken to the raptures of intense personal attachment from seeming ludicrous and almost indecent. Whatever other gifts Comte may have had-and he had many of the rarest kind,-poetic imagination was not among them, any more than poetic or emotional expression was among them. His was one of those natures whose faculty of deep feeling is unhappily doomed to be inarticulate, and to pass away without the magic power of transmitting itself. Positive Comte lost no time, after the completion of his Course of Positive Philosophy, in proceeding with. the System of Positive Polity, to which the earlier work was designed to be a foundation. The first volume was published in 1851, and the fourth and last in 1854. In 1848, when the political air was charged with stimulating elements, he founded the Positive Society, with, the expectation that it might grow into a reunion as powerful over the new revolution as the Jacobin Club had been in the revolution of 1789. The hope was not fulfilled, but a certain number of philosophic disciples gathered round Comte, and eventually formed themselves, under the guidance of the new ideas of the latter half of his life, into a kind of church. In the years 1849, 1850, and 1851, Comte gave three courses of lectures at the Palais Royal. They were gratuitous and popular, and in them he boldly advanced the whole of his doctrine, as well as the direct and immediate pretensions of himself and his system. The third course ended in the following uncompromising terms-"In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of Humanity-both its philosophical and its practical servants-come forward to claim as their due the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all departments,-moral, intellectual, and material. Consequently they exclude once for all from political supremacy all the different servants of God-Catholic, Protestant, or Deist-as being at once behindhand, and a cause of disturbance." A few weeks after this invitation, a very different person stepped forward to constitute himself a real Providence. Death. application. How is this crisis to be dealt with? What are the undertakings necessary in order to pass successfully through it towards an organic state? The answer to this is that there are two series of works. The first is theoretic or spiritual, aiming at the development of a new principle of co-ordinating social relations, and the formation of the system of general ideas which are destined to guide society. The second work is practical or temporal; it settles the distribution of power, and the institutions that are most conformable to the spirit of the system which has previously been thought out in the course of the theoretic work. As the practical work depends on the conclusions of the theoretical, the latter must obviously come first in order of execution. In 1826 this was pushed further in a most remarkable piece called Considerations on the Spiritual Power-the main object of which is to demonstrate the necessity of instituting a spiritual power, distinct from the temporal power and independent of it. In examining the conditions of a spiritual power proper for modern times, he indicates in so many terms the presence in his mind of a direct analogy between his proposed spiritual power and the func tions of the Catholic clergy at the time of its greatest vigor and most complete independence,- that is to say, from about the middle of the 11th century until towards the end of the 13th. He refers to De Maistre's memorable book, Du Pape, as the most profound, accurate, and methodical account of the old spiritual organization, and starts from that as the model to be adapted to the changed intellectual and social conditions of the modern time. In the Positive Philosophy, again (vol. v. p. 344), he distinctly says that Catholicism, reconstituted as a system on new intellectual foundations, would finally preside over the spiritual reorganization of modern society. Much else could easily be quoted to the same effect. If unity of career, then, means that Comte from the beginning designed the institution of a spiritual power, and the systematic reorganization of life, it is difficult to deny him whatever credit that unity may be worth, and the credit is perhaps not particularly great. Even the re-adaptation of the Catholic system to a scientific doctrine was plainly in his mind thirty years before the final execution of the Positive Polity, though it is difficult to believe that he foresaw the religious mysticism in which the task was to land him. A great analysis was to precede a great synthesis, but it was the synthesis on which Comte's vision was centred from the first. Let us first sketch the nature of the analysis. Society is to be reorganized on the base of knowledge. What is the sum and significance of knowledge? That is the question which Comte's first masterwork professes to answer. Three States. In 1852 Comte published the Catechism of Positivism. In the preface to it he took occasion to express his approval of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état of the second of December," a fortunate crisis which has set aside the parliamentary system, and instituted a dictatorial republic." Whatever we may think of the political sagacity of such a judgment, it is due to Comte to say that he did not expect to see his dictatorial republic transformed into a dynastic empire, and, next, that he did expect from the Man of December freedom of the press and of public meeting. His later hero was the Emperor Nicholas, "the only statesman in Christendom," as unlucky a judgment as that which placed Dr. Francia in the Comtist Calendar. În 1857 he was attacked by cancer, and died peaceably on the 5th of September of that year. The anniversary is always celebrated by ceremonial gatherings of his French and English followers, who then commemorate the name and the services of the founder of their religion. Comte was under sixty when he died. We cannot help reflecting that one of the worst of all the evils connected with the shortness of human life is the impatience which it breeds in some of the most ardent and enlightened minds to hurry on the execution of projects, for which neither the time nor the spirit of their author is fully ripe. In proceeding to give an outline of Comte's Comte's philosophic system, we shall consider the Positive Polity as consistency. the more or less legitimate sequel of the Positive Philosophy, notwithstanding the deep gulf which so eminent a critic as Mr. Mill insisted upon fixing between the earlier and the later work. There may be, as we think there is, the greatest difference in their value, and the temper is not the same, nor the method. But the two are quite capable of being regarded, and for the pur-lition, either in the object or in some supernatural being. poses of an account of Comte's career ought to be regarded, as an integral whole. His letters when he was a young man of one-and-twenty, and before he had published a word, show how strongly present the social motive was in his mind, and in what little account he should hold his scientific works, if he did not perpetually think of their utility for the species. "I feel," he wrote, "that such scientific reputation as I might acquire would give more value, more weight, more useful influence to my political sermons." In 1822 he published a Plan of the Scientific Works necessary to Reorganize Society. In this Early opuscule he points out that modern society is writings. passing through a great crisis, due to the conflict of two opposing movements, the first, a disorganizing movement owing to the break-up of old institutions and beliefs; the second, a movement towards a definite social state, in which all means of human prosperity will receive their most complete development and most direct The Positive Philosophy opens with the statement of a certain law of which Comte was the Law of the discoverer, and which has always been treated both by disciples and dissidents as the key to his system. This is the Law of the Three States. It is as follows. Each of our leading conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes successively through three different phases; there are three different ways in which the human mind explains phenomena, each way following the other in order. These three stages are the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Positive. Knowledge, or a branch of knowledge, is in the Theological state when it supposes the phenomena under consideration to be due to immediate voIn the Metaphysical state, for volition is substituted abstract force residing in the object, yet existing independently of the object; the phenomena are viewed as if apart from the bodies manifesting them; and the properties of each substance have attributed to them an existence distinct from that substance. In the Positive state, inherent volition or external volition and inherent force or abstraction personified have both disappeared from men's minds, and the explanation of a phenomena means a reference of it, by way of succession or resemblance, to some other phenomenon,-means the establishment of a relation between the given fact and some more general fact. In the Theological and Metaphysical state men seek a cause or an essence; in the Positive they are content with a law. To borrow an illustration from an able English disciple of Comte:-"Take the phenomenon of the sleep produced by opium. The Arabs are content to attribute it to the will of God.' Molière's medical student accounts for it |