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 sentiment 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 idealising 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.

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.

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 2d 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.

In 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 that 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 system, we shall consider the Positive Polity as 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.[2] 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 purposes 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 Reorganise Society. In this opuscule he points out that modern society is passing through a great crisis, due to the conflict of two opposing movements,—the first, a disorganising 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 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.