330 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1865. when printed, to which so brief an account is more like a pre- 

 liminary objection than anything else. 



Yours very truly, 



A. DE MORGAN. 



To J. S. Mill, Esq. 



March 26, 1865. 



MY DEAR SIR, I thank you for the article on Comte received 

 a few days ago. It gives me a much more definite idea of Comte 

 than I ever had patience to get from himself. His writing 

 always had to me a smack of that unequalled prolixity which he 

 showed in his algebraic geometry, where he discourses in page 

 after page on the equation of a straight line, without a symbol. 

 I settled that he was not a psychologist. I make out from you 

 that he would not &e, prepensely. I thought he was impatient of 

 the subject, but did not fathom all his guilt. 



I am confirmed in my view that his philosophy is, so far as it 

 is distinctively his, negativism. For his positivism I find in all 

 thinkers, or nine out of ten ; his rejections, hardly anywhere. 

 Positive, because no more than positive. When understood thus, 

 he is a bearable companion, for one has a right to be as anti- 

 positive with his philosophy as he is positive with mind and 

 matter ; i.e., as he has taken part for the whole, I take his whole 

 for part. 



I shall soon send you a paper in which I find I am a sort of 

 Positivist. There are those who reject all but phenomena ; there 

 are those who reject phenomena because they cannot have more. 

 Comte is the assailant of those who accept more because they 

 think they can get more. In the mathematical treatment of 

 infinity, small and great, most mathematicians reject the abso- 

 lute treatment because they cannot image, or treat as phe- 

 nomena, all the attributes of the notion. My notion is that oo 7 and 



-^ 7 have a subjective reality, of which various phenomena are 



proper subjects of direct reasoning. The mathematicians have 

 virtually denied that A is B is a component of reasoning when 

 we know it to be true even though A and B should be porcu- 

 pines with difficulties for quills. In my paper in two parts, oo 

 is a porcupine, and = is a hedgehog. 



I see you are in England again by your complimentary letter 

 to the Westminster electors. You pay them a higher compli- 

 ment than they pay you. I am always in doubt about the origin 



