142 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



objective activity, in which there is as little brooding over 

 self as possible. The less we think of ourselves, and the 

 more we think of our work, the better. Dwelling on subjective 

 fancies rarely fails to throw the mind out of balance ; it is at 

 the bottom of all religious melancholia and suicidal mono- 

 mania, as well as of many other forms of cerebral disease. For 

 a dozen or fifteen years, Comte's life was such as to make a 

 man insane, if anything could ; and we should not forget, 

 whatever may be the physiological significance of the fact, 

 that in his early manhood he had experienced a violent attack 

 of acute mania. His astounding self-conceit was more akin 

 to that which may be seen in lunatic asylums than to 

 anything which is known to have been manifested by persons 

 in a state of health. I am strongly inclined to believe that 

 the harmonious activity of his brain never fully recovered 

 from the shock given it by that first attack. Very likely 

 that attack is partly responsible for the self-brooding tendency 

 which led him to abandon the world, and lead a secluded life 

 among his own unbridled fancies. And it is not improbable 

 that this long-continued self-communion carried him on the 

 road to chronic subacute monomania, until, when he wrote 

 the " Synthase Subjective," he had just overstepped the ill- 

 defined limit which divides precarious cerebral health from 

 pronounced cerebral disease. Nevertheless this hypothesis, 

 though it seems most plausible, is perhaps not absolutely 

 required by the facts. In this chapter we have seen how an 

 exclusive reliance on the subjective method has bred in 

 others, besides Comte, the most shocking extravagances. It 

 may be, after all, that Comte's vagaries are not so very much 

 wilder than those of Hegel and Plato ; since Plato's absurdities 

 are less in conflict with the scientific knowledge of the times 

 in which they were conceived, and Hegel's are veiled by the 

 dense obscurity of a pompous metaphysical terminology. 

 When Hegel tells us that " Seyn ist Seyn, und nicht Anders : 

 Anders ist Anders, und nicht Seyn " (Being is Being, and not 



