INTRODUCTION. III.

 The unity of the doctrine has been disputed. Comte himself distinguished two successive “careers” in his life. In the first, he says, without affected modesty, he was Aristotle: in the second he will be St. Paul. The founder of the philosophy did but pave the way for the organiser of the religion. “I11 have systematically devoted my life to draw at last from real science the necessary basis of a sound philosophy, according to which I was afterwards to construct the true religion.”5   Many of Comte’s disciples, even some of the more illustrious, and at first more fervent, such as Littré, refused to follow him in his “second career.” Their admiration for the philosopher could not persuade them to submit to the pontiff.   Littré and his friends were undoubtedly free to follow Comte only up to a certain point, and, while accepting his philosophy, to reject his religion. If they had stopped there, Comte could but have blamed their want of logic and himself have disowned “those incomplete positivists, who are not more intelligent because they call themselves intellectual.” But it is they, on the contrary, who accused Comte of inconsistency and of self contradiction. Comte, they said, betrayed his own principles. The “subjective method” in his second career ruined the precious results he had obtained in the first by his objective method. In refusing to go beyond the Cours de philosophic positive they remained more faithful to Comte’s master-thought than Comte himself. In a word, they defended true positivism against its misguided founder.   Comte answered these attacks, which were all the more painful to him because they came from those whom he had long regarded as his faithful disciples and his best friends. In the course of this work it will appear that those attacks were unfounded.6 Comte’s two methods are not opposed to each other. They complete each other, as do also the two “careers” which they characterize.   It is true that during the last two years of his life an increasingly marked tinge of mysticism spread over his thought and his writings. His brief friendship with Mme. de Vaux, and the death of this “holy” friend had stirred very12 strong emotions within him, and these emotions with him were transformed into ideas which came to be incorporated into his system. At the same time he laboured to organise the Religion of Humanity. He claimed to secure for it an authority over souls at least equal to that which had been enjoyed by Catholicism at the period of its greatest power. The exaltation of his sentiments, the preoccupation of the new religion which was to be established, the ever-present consciousness of his sacerdotal mission, all this was necessarily bound to react upon the doctrine which he had founded in the preceding period.   Thus the philosophy of the sciences and of history is no longer presented to us in the same way in the Politique positive as it is in the Cours de philosophie positive. But it is designedly so. The difference in tone and the difference of method in the setting forth is explained, according to Comte, by the different object which he has in view in each of these works.7 Essentially, the philosophical doctrine has not varied. All we can grant to Littré is that by the fact of its being presented from the religious, that is to say from the synthetic, point of view in the Politique positive, it undergoes an apparent alteration. If we only knew the doctrine through this work we should not get the perfectly clear view of it given in the Cours de philosophie positive. Comte himself often advises the reader of the Politique to refer to his “great fundamental treatise.”   But, on the other hand, in carefully reading the Cours, we find numerous indications of the future structure of the Politique positive. Comte might have been content with a reference to the Cours, to answer the objections of his dissenting disciples. He did better. He reprinted at the end of the fourth volume of his Politique positive six pamphlets13 written in his youth from 1818 to 1826. In them, not only is his philosophy already sketched in its main outlines with sufficient precision; but the idea that philosophy is a preliminary work, a simple prelude and that the essential work, the supreme end, is the positive religion which shall arise upon this philosophy—this idea is the very soul of these pamphlets. The proof is given. Upon the question of the unity of his doctrine Comte wins the case against Littré.