382 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



by vagueness, seemed to have acquired, both with Mill 

 and Comte, definite forms at an unusually early age. 

 Both also took at this early age a lively interest in 

 social questions. But whereas for Mill the private and 

 personal influence of his father ruled supreme and 

 fixed permanently some of his mental characteristics, the 

 great school for Comte was the Ecole Polytechnique in 

 Paris. According to his own statement,^ in a letter to 



1 The letter to Mill is dated 

 22nd July 1842 ; to the same year 

 belongs also the publication of the 

 sixth and last volume of the ' Cours 

 de Philosophie Positive. ' This eon- 

 tains an elaborate preface occupied 

 mostly with personal explanations. 

 Comte there complains of the want 

 of support and appreciation of his 

 philosophical labours on the part 

 of the members of the govern- 

 ing body of the Ecole Poly- 

 technique. To this he attributes 

 his failure to gain a professor- 

 ship, his connection having been 

 limited to that of an entrance 

 examiner. A reactionary spirit 

 very different from that which 

 governed the earlier period, when 

 in 1814 Comte had entered the 

 school, had, after a crisis in 1816, 

 gradually supervened in thedirection 

 of the establishment. This change 

 corresponds in time with the change 

 which took place in Comte's own 

 ideas, when, in the course of the 

 composition of his great work, he 

 came to deal with the biological 

 and political sciences. He recog- 

 nised more and more, what he 

 had already indicated in an earlier 

 tract (see above, p. 193, note), that 

 the purely mathematical spirit, the 

 analytical method, or, as lie called 

 it, the esprit de ditail, must as we 

 ascend in the sciences be supplanted 

 or compensated by the esj)rit d'en- 

 scmble. This development of his 

 own opinions, to which he gave 



full expression in the 57th chapter 

 of the 'Cours,' is significant, and 

 was accompanied by his personal 

 experience of the disproportionate 

 encouragement which the mathe- 

 matical or analytic spirit enjoyed 

 at the expense of what we may now 

 term the synoptic spirit. He had 

 at one time hoped to introduce 

 what he termed la vraie spiriHuditi 

 moderne, through Guizot, whom he 

 reluctantly approached with a pro- 

 posal of founding, at the College de 

 France, a Chair devoted directly to 

 the general history of the positive 

 sciences. But the want of sym- 

 pathy which Guizot himself ex- 

 hibited towards the purely mathe- 

 matical tendencies re.sulted finally 

 not in a support of the philosophie 

 positive, but in the "dangerous re- 

 storation of an academy happily 

 suppressed by Bonaparte." This 

 was the restoration of the "Aca- 

 demic de Science Morale" referred 

 to in vol. i. p. 145 of this History. 

 "It is necessary," Comte says, 

 " carefully to distinguish the two 

 schools which, spontaneously an- 

 tagonistic, divide between them- 

 selves, though so far very unequally, 

 the general rule of rational posi- 

 tivism : the mathematical school, 

 properly so called, still dominating 

 without serious contention the 

 whole of the inorganic studies, and 

 the biological school, striving feebly 

 at present to maintain, against the 

 irrational ascendancy of the former, 



