Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/257

Rh COMPOSTELLA, a city of Spain in the Galician pro vince ot Corufia, more frequently called Santiago, in honour 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.  COMPTON, (1G32-1713), 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 also appointed a member of the Privy Council, and intrusted with the education of the two princesses Mary and Anne. Compton showed a liberality most unusual at the time to Protestant dissenters, whom he wished to reunite with the established church. He held several conferences on the subject with the clergy of his diocese ; and in the hope of influencing candid minds by means of the opinions of unbiassed foreigners, he obtained letters treating 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 rirmness 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 coronation ; 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.

1em  COMTE,, 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 c.ipacity, 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 gathered up into a systematic whole along with the rest of our knowledge. This presiding doctrine connects Comte with the social thinkers of the 18th century, indirectly ivith 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 Comte was born in January 1798, at Montpellier, where his father was a receiver-general of taxes for the district. He was sent for his earliest instruction to the school of the town, and in 1814 was admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique. His youth was marked by a constant willingness to rebel against merely official authority; to genuine excellence, whether moral or intellectual, he was always ready to pay unbounded deference. That strenuous application which was one of his most remarkable gifts in manhood showed itself in his youth, and his application was backed or inspired by superior intelligence and aptness. After he had been two years at the Ecole Polytschnique 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. &quot; I ssek to imitate the modern Socrates,&quot; he wrote to a school friend, &quot; 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.&quot; Though Comte s character and aims wsre 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. For a moment circumstances led him to think of seeking a career in America, but a friend who preceded him thither warned him of the purely practical spirit that prevailed in the new country. &quot; If Lagrauge were to come to the United States, he could only earn his livelihood by turning land surveyor.&quot; So Comte remained in Paris, living as he best could on something less than 80 a year, and hoping, when he took the trouble to break his meditations upon greater things by hopes about himself, that he might by- and-by obtain an appointment as mathematical master iu a school. A friend procured him a situation as tutor in the house of Casimir P^rier. 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 needi- ness and contentment. He was not altogether without the young man s appetite for pleasure ; yet when he was only nineteen wo find him wondering, amid the gaieties 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 diawbacks, but it has the immense advan tage over academic ease of making the student s interest in men real, and not merely literary.

Towards 1818 Comte became associated as friend and disciple with a man who was destined to exercise a very decisive influence upon the turn of his speculation. Henry, count of Saint Simon, was second cousin of the famous duke of Saint Simon, the friend of the Regent, and author 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 ssrious reputation, he had at least excited the curiosity and interest of his con temporaries 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 char acteristic faculty was an exuberant imagination, working in the sphere of real things. Scientific disciplinedidnothing 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 ii_ 