briefly and pertinently as we may, to supply a plain, unvarnished memoir of the notable thinker who aspired to be the reformer of civilization; the re-organizer of social life; the regenerator of science, and the neo-evangelist of a worship before which those instituted by Menu, Zoroaster, Moses, and Mohammed, the polytheism of the old classic times, the idolatries of modern heathenism, and the theology of even the self-sacrificing death-victor Jesus Christ, shall pass away like the mists of morning in the sunrise-like things which had uses and show beauties, but which must change and depart in the ultimate brightness of the noon of truth. If we allow as little of prejudice or of partisanship as possible to get distilled into our narrative, and if we collect and arrange with impar tiality, and an honest endeavour to attain to the truth, the scattered facts of a remarkable life, and bring them in a reasonably compacted form before the English reader, we shall at least effect a useful work; inasmuch as a fair statement of facts is admitted on all hands to be one of the prime essentials to the acquisition of a proper estimate either of a man, an event, a scientific truth, or a theological doctrine. There are, in the life of M. Comte, a nobility of effort and a loftiness of aim, a grandeur of aspiration and an intensity of purpose; there are in his writings so much mental energy and originality of thought, so much subtlety and hardihood of suggestion, so much temerity in destroying, and so much ingenuity in rebuilding knowledge and faith, so much rebellious strength and so much conservative conceptiveness, that signal advantage may be gained from the contemplation of the life and labours of the legislator of sociology, and the renovator alike of science, politics, philosophy, faith, life, and worship. Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was born at Montpellier, in the department Hérault, in Languedoc, January 19th, 1798. His father, Auguste Louis Comte, was cashier in the Revenue Office of Hérault, and his mother was Félicité Rosalie Boyer. Of the character or disposition of the elder Comte we can learn nothing; his mother seems to have had a powerful personal influence over him. They were devotedly monarchical in politics, and in their religion Catholics, sincere and austere even to super stition; and perhaps the worst effect of this ignorant devotion was the keen disgust which, when a boy, Auguste Comte learned to entertain for religious observances, theological morals, and ecclesiastical dogmas. As a boy Auguste was small and delicate, though not sickly, and he entered the college of his native town in the ninth year of his age. He was industrious and intelligent, so that he became distinguished soon; but he was also quarrelsome and stubborn, and therefore he not unfrequently brought down on himself pretty severe punishment. He played little but helped his companions readily, and hence was much liked by them. A year earlier than usual Auguste Comte passed the public com petitive examination fixed as a preliminary to entrance into the Polytechnic School at Paris, instituted in 1794, and remodelled in 1804. To pass the year which must elapse prior to commencing his Polytechnic instruction, Comte requested permission to return to school, and there voluntarily acting for his professor, M. Encontre, he taught mathematics to the pupils, and thus effectually revised the studies to which the previous years had been devoted. On his entrance, at the close of 1814, he was placed first on the list of M. Francœur, but after a year's attendance he was only ninth on the class list, his insubordination and careless caligraphy causing him to be thus put down. After the second Restoration, July, 1815, the staff of professors was changed; several were dismissed, and fresh men appointed. The pupils of the Polytechnic, dissatisfied with the overbearing manners of one of the teachers, sought the sympathy of their seniors, and it was resolved to memorialize that teacher not to reappear in the school. Comte composed the letter, and was the first to sign it. On account of this the school was broken up (3rd April, 1816)—though it was reconstituted in September of the same year, and the pupils were rusticated. As the Polytechnic was intended only for the training of those who were inclined to enter the public service, this dismissal was equivalent to a decree against their being allowed to pursue an official career. His parents were naturally displeased, and he, unwilling to assent to their implied censure, determined to return to Paris. "To elaborate my ideas, I chose," he says, "of my own accord, in 1816, the teaching of mathematics, in regard to which my special aptitude, I venture to affirm, was noticed, while I studied at the Polytechnic school, both by my professors and by my companions." His family refused to aid him; and as mathematical instruction promised but a shabby subsistence, for much work, in the shape of a certainty, to one so young, somewhat under a cloud, too, with no means of pushing himself into notice, he listened eagerly to a project communicated to him by General Campredon, a native of Montpellier and a friend of the Comtes. General Bernard, who had attained some distinction in the Imperial Army, but who had passed into the service of the United States, expected to induce the Western Republic to found a school similar to the Polytechnic, and was willing, should he succeed, to confer on Auguste Comte the chair of analytical mathematics; but Congress refused the funds, and America lost the honour of numbering among its citizens the founder of the positive philosophy. At this time he was an active-minded, well-informed, ambitious young man, well acquainted with the facts of history and the principles of the inorganic sciences; and eager to pursue the course of thought laid open to man in philosophy and politics. Feeling thus, he entered into an engagement as secretary to Casimer Perier, banker, author, and statesman; but the freedom of his remarks upon his patron's works led to a separation in something less than a month. In 1818 he found a new connection of far greater importance, namely, that with Claude Henri, Count of Saint Simon, the social philosopher and founder of the sect of the Saint Simonians, then 66 engaged in considering a project for the "Reorganization of European Society," by the institution of a Parliament of Europe to arbitrate in all international disputes. Of Saint Simon's disciples Comte was the latest and the most favoured-the Benjamin of the patriarch of socialism among the other members of whose disciplefamily were Thierry, Bailly (De Blois), Halévy, Enfantin, Buchet, Carnot, Chevalier, Duvergier, Leroux, Reynaud, Périère, &c. To Saint Simon, Comte held the threefold character of assistant, pupil, and friend. He was thus brought to engage in the criticism of thought, and in discussions regarding the faith and practice of mankind-a most important era in the education of one who is reported, like Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, to have planned while a youth at college, an entire renovation of philosophy,"-more even than that, "a social renovation based on a mental revolution." From 1818 to 1820 the influence of Saint Simon was powerful upon him. In 1819 M. Comte composed an article on "The General Separation between Opinions and Desires," intended for insertion in Le Censeur. It was not published in that journal, but it appears as an appendix to vol. iv. of his "Cours de Philosophie Positive," to be afterwards noticed; and in 1820 he produced a Brief Estimate of the Entirety of the Modern Past," which was inserted in L'Organizateur, the journal of the Saint Simonians, and that in which M. Comte's philosophical ideas were first laid before the public. He also published some articles with his signature attached to them in the Encyclopædic Review. Benjamin Constant accused him of advocating in these articles an industrial Papacy. The era of M. Comte's earliest insight into the problems of social existence, and of the true solutions of them, is very marked. In his twenty-fifth year-in 1822-he fell into an ecstasy of meditation, in which he continued for eighty consecutive hours, and in the course of which the bases of all his subsequent philosophy were laid by the envisionment, if not the revelation, of the great sociological laws of which all his subsequent investigations are but elucidation, and by regard to which all his future inquiries were influenced. The third volume of the important manifesto of the sect of the Saint Simonians-" Industry; or, Discussions Political, Moral, and Philosophical"-was the work of the youngest and most enthusiastic of the disciples of the pupil of D'Alembert. In 1822 Saint Simon had prepared a work on "The Social Contract," to which Comte supplied a section entitled "A Scheme of the Labours requisite for the Reorganization of Society;" but the impression was limited to a hundred proof presentation copies. In December, 1823, Saint Simon, in his " Catéchisme des Industriels," promised a work which he had confided to his pupil Auguste Comte upon "Scientific Method and the Method of Education;" but when the time for its publication arrived, in 1824, he could not get the sort of treatise he wanted from his pupil, who had by this time formed a theory of his own, and he was compelled to issue in its place a work-written in 1822, and then published anonymously-entitled "A System of Positive Politics, by A. Comte, formerly a student of the Polytechnic School, pupil of Henri Saint Simon." The book appeared with a double preface-one by the editor and another by the author-clearly indicating that a moment had arrived when each must henceforth take his own way, and that the bonds of unity had been snapped. This rupture was announced by M. Comte to a former pupil of his in mathematics and philosophy, M. G. D'Eichthal, as "complete and irrevocable," in a long letter detailing the cause and course of the quarrel, bearing date 1st May, 1824. This event proved to be the birth-throe of the positive philosophy, which is used as a phrase only, and nothing more, in the work which originated, or was the immediate cause of this quarrel. On 5th August, Comte communicated its elements to M. D'Eichthal, and in November, 1825, and March, 1826, he furnished papers entitled "Philosophic Considerations on the Sciences and Scientific Men," and "The New Spiritual Power," which appeared respectively in Nos. 5, 7, 8, 10, and in 13, 20, and 21 of Le Producteur, a journal edited by his friend M. Cerclet; and his scheme appeared in some respects fully developed in his programme of a course of " Positive Philosophy," in seventy-two lectures, from 1st April, 1826, to 1st April, 1827, which was as follows: Sciences of Inorganic Bodies. Astronomy 10 Science of ( Physiology 10 Organic Bodies. Social Physics 14 This course was commenced in Comte's house, 13, Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, on Sabbath, 2nd of April, at noon, before an auditory of the celebrities of the day, among whom we may note Humboldt, the cosmist; Blainville, the zoologist and anatomist; Poinsot, the mathematician of mechanics; Dunoyer, the economist, among the elder; while among the younger hearers were Allier, Carnot, Cerelet, D'Eichthal, Goudinet, Mellet, Mongery, Montebello, &c. Only three lectures of this course, however, were delivered, when that "cerebral crisis" occurred of which he has given. such a singular account in his "Philosophie Positive," and to which three circumstances largely contributed,-household anxieties acting upon a digestion already weakened by study and privation, extreme tension of mind in the production of his new philosophy in systematic lectures, and his controversy with some of the Saint Simonians, whom he accused of plagiarizing his ideas without acknowledgment. To explain his domestic anxieties we must return to 1824, in which year he had been introduced by M. Cerclet to Caroline Massin, who had been in business as a bookseller for about two years. On 19th February, 1825, Comte, after some difficulty on the part of his family, and some hesitancy on the part of Miss Massin, because M. Comte would not agree to any religious ceremonial, married her by civil contract, which constitutes a validly legal matrimonial connection in France. His household establishment was set up in the Rue de l'Oratoire, opposite the church, and there, as a means of subsistence, Comte proposed to take pupils at home, and to give private lessons to pupils at their own houses. He had then only one home pupil, C. L. L. J. de Lamoricière, afterwards a statesman and warrior, then a pupil in the Polytechnic School; but in this strait his wife was able to place a small sum at his disposal, and he was induced hopefully to apply to M. de Villèle, then Minister of the Interior, to get something to do. From him he got a polite reply, but no help; and he also failed to gain a position as professor of physics and chemistry at Sorèze, for which he was an applicant. The conductor of the Athenæum asked him to compose a series of papers during the winter on the philosophy of history as he conceived it, but this he was inclined to refuse, as requiring too much condensation, and as being likely to impair the interest of the course he was meditating. At this time M. de Narbonne offered to place his son under M. Comte's care as a pupil and boarder, and with this as a beginning he hoped to be able to extend his connection among the families of the upper classes. He took and furnished a house for this purpose at the corner of the Rue St. Lazare, in the Rue de l'Arcade, but the scheme failed. He sent young Narbonne home, and set out with his wife on a trip to Montpellier. On their return to Paris he rented the lodging in the Faubourg-Montmartre in which the positive philosophy was first expounded, and here it was that insanity seized him. For nearly a month he had been irritable and passionate, and at last he suddenly left the house and Paris. Madame Comte set out in search of him, and found him at Montmorency. She called the local physician, who visited him frequently, and she also sent a letter to M. de Blainville. By and by M. Comte appeared less excited, and proposed a walk, to which Madame Comte consented. The path taken led them to the Lake d'Enghien, and when they reached the banks M. Comte made a rush into the water, attempting to drag his wife in along with him. She struggled, resisted, and, holding by the roots of the bushes on the margin, saved both. She went to the mayor of Montmorency, and besought him to procure two wardens, whom she would pay, while she set out to Paris to see De Blainville, who had not come. Nearly at midnight she called on him, and besought him to come. He promised to follow in the morning. She returned, and he reached Montmorency next day at nine o'clock, where |