Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/258

Rh 230 C M T E real matter, even the right ideas were as often as not accom panied by wrong ones. The young Comte, now twenty, was enchanted by the philosophic veteran. In after years he so far forgot him self 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. &quot; I certainly,&quot; he writes to his most intimate friend, &quot; 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.&quot; 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 vigour and coherence. As high a degree of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as Moliere and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art, In philosophy the conditions are not different. Ilfaut prendre son bien ou on le trouve. It is no detriment to Comte s fame that some of the ideas which he recombined and incorporated in a great philoso phic 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 other 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 poli tical 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 is 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 con versation, 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 ou 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 1825 Comte married. His marriage was one of those Mam; of which &quot; magnanimity owes no account to prudence,&quot; 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 disputes 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: &quot;I have nothing left but to concentrate my whole moral exist ence 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.&quot; 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. &quot; I would rather spend an evening,&quot; wrote the needy enthusiast, &quot; in solving a difficult question, than in running after some empty-headed and consequential millionaire in search of a pupil.&quot; A little money was earned by an occasional article in Le Prodndeur, 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, &quot; You talk too freely, your ideas are getting abroad, and other people use them without giving you the credit ; put your ownership on record.&quot; 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. Unhappily, after the third lecture of the course, Comte Scrioi had a severe attack of cerebral derangement, brought on illness 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 tho fact that the unfortunate man was at the time neither more nor less than raving mad. To such shocking con spiracies against common sense and decency does ecclesias tical 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 tlu