Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/260

Rh 232 C M T E loss of income made up to him, until Comte should have had time to repair that loss by his own endeavour. Mr Mill persuaded Grote, Molesworth, and Raikes Currie tc 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 the plan, but he speedily surprised and disconcerted Mr Mill by boldly taking up the position of &quot; high moral magistrate,&quot; and accusing the three defaulting contributors of a scandalous falling away from righteousness and a high miud. Mr Mill was chilled by these pretensions ; they struck him as savouring 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 free- question of dom that is secured to the professors and propagators of the subsidy. official system by the state or by the universities. 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 a 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 whom he both knows and approves of? On the other hand, Grote and Molesworth might say that, for anything they could tell, they would find themselves to be helping the construction of a system of which they utterly disapproved. And, as things turned out, they would have been perfectly justified in this serious appre hension. To have done anything to make the production of the Positive Polity easier would have been 110 ground for anything but remorse to any of the three. It is just to Comte to remark that he always assumed that the con tributors to the support of a thinker should be in all essentials of method and doctrine that thinker s disciples ; aid from indifferent persons he counted irrational and humiliating. But is an endowment ever a blessing to the man who receives it? The question is difficult to answer generally; in Comte s case there is reason in the doubts felt by Madame Comte as to the expediency of relieving the philosopher from the necessity of being in plain and business-like relations with indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in the week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep egoism within decent bounds, and they must be not only a relief, but a wholesome corrective to the tendencies of concentrated thinking on abstract subjects. Kvuey What finally happened was this. From 1845 to 1848 Comte lived as best he could, as well as made his wife her allowance, on an income of 200 a year. We need scarcely say that he was rigorously thrifty. His little account books of income and outlay, with every item entered down to a few hours before his death, are accurate and neat enough to have satisfied an ancient Roman householder. In 1848, through no fault of his own, his salary was reduced to 80. M. Littre and others, with Comte s approval, published an appeal for subscriptions, and on the money thus contributed Comte subsisted for the remaining nine years of his life. By 1 S52 the subsidy produced as much as 200 a year. It is worth noticing, after the story we have told, that Mr Mill TV AS one of the subscribers, and that M. Littre continued his assistance after he had been driven from Comte a society by his high pontifical airs. W&quot;e are sorry not to be able to record any similar trait of magnanimity on Comte s part. His character, admirable as it is for firm ness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet oiFers 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, domi neering, and not quite free from petty bitterness. If you seek to place yourself in sympathy with Comte Lit* it is best to think of him only as the intellectual worker, met pursuing in uncomforted obscurity the laborious and absorb ing 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 exhaust ing 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 memo randum, 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), w T hich would fill forty of the large pages of this Encyclopaedia. 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. Whsn compared with such philosophic writing as Hume s, Diderot s, Berkeley s, then Comte s manner is heavy, laboured, monotonous, without relief, and without light. There is now and then an energetic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune ; the sentences are overloaded ; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deaden the effect beyond the endurance of all but the most resolute students. Only the profound and stimulating interest of much of the matter prevents one from thinking of Rivarol s ill-natured remark upon Condorcet, that he wrote with opium on a page of lead. The general effect is impressive, not by any virtues of style, for we do not discern one, but by reason of the magnitude and importance of the undertaking, and the visible conscientiousness and the grasp with which it is executed. It is by sheer strength of thought, by the vigorous perspicacity with which he strikes the lines of cleavage of his subject, that he makes his way into the mind of the reader; in the presence of gifts of this power we need not quarrel with an ungainly style. Comte pursued one practice which ought to be mentioned Ilyj ir connection with his personal history, the practice of C ^ K what he styled hi/yiene cerebrale. After he had acquired what he considered to be a sufficient stock of material, and this happened before he had completed the Positive Philosophy, he abstained deliberately and scrupulously from