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I

Eight years after the first Système de politique positive16.1 there began to appear that work of Comte to which his fame is mainly due. The Cours de philosophie positive, the literary version of the series of lectures which he had first started in 1826, and then, after recovery from his mental illness, delivered in 1829, extended to six volumes, which appeared between 1830 and 1842.16.2In devoting the best years of his manhood to this theoretical task, Comte remained faithful to the conviction which had led to his break with Saint-Simon: that the political reorganization of society could be achieved only after the spiritual foundation had been laid by a reorganization of all knowledge.16.3 But he never lost sight of the political task. The main philosophical work was duly followed by the definite Système de politique positive (4 vols., 1851-54) which, in spite of all its bizarre excrescences, is a consistent execution of the plans of his youth. And if his death in 1857 had not prevented it, this would have been followed by the third part of the original plan, a similarly elaborate treatise on technology or ``the action of man upon nature.''

No attempt can be made here to give an adequate summary of the whole of Comte's philosophy or of its evolution. We are concerned only with the birth of the new discipline, of which Saint-Simon and the younger Comte had only dreamed but which the latter's mature works brought into existence. Yet, as the whole of Comte's work is directed toward this end, this is not a sufficient restriction of our task. We shall have to confine ourselves to a consideration of those aspects of his immense work which, either because of their influence on other leading thinkers of the period, or because they are particularly representative of the intellectual tendencies of the age, are of special significance. They concern mainly the methods appropriate to the study of social phenomena, a subject which is extensively treated in the Cours. But it should perhaps be pointed out that it is because the subjects which mainly concern us are treated in that work that we shall confine ourselves to its contents, and that we cannot accept the belief, at one time widely held, that there is a fundamental break between it and Comte's later work, brought about by the increasingly pathological state of his mind.16.4

A few further facts of Comte's life may be recalled here which will help to understand his views and the extent and limits of his influence. The most important feature of his career is, perhaps, that trained as a mathematician he remained one by profession. Though the greater part of his life he derived his income from coaching and examining in mathematics for the Ecole polytechnique--but the professorship at the institution which he coveted remained denied to him. The repeated disappointments and the quarrels caused by his recriminations, which in the end lost him even the modest positions which he held, explain to some extent his increasing isolation, his outspoken contempt for most of his scientific contemporaries, and the almost complete neglect of his work in his own country during his lifetime. Although in the end he found a few enthusiastic disciples, it is on the whole not difficult to see why to most people he seems to have appeared a singularly unattractive figure, whose whole intellectual style has often repelled those who have most in common with him.16.5 The man who prided himself that in a few years of his youth he had absorbed all the knowledge from which he could construct a grandiose systematization of all human science and who, through a great part of his life, practiced a ``cerebral hygiene'' consisting in not reading any new publications, was not likely to be readily accepted as that preceptor mundi et universae scientiae he claimed to be. The excessive length and prolixity and the clumsy style of his mature works were a further bar to its popularity. Yet if this restricted the number of people who became directly acquainted with his work, it was made up for by the profound effect it had on some of the most influential thinkers of the age. Although largely indirect, his influence was among the most potent in the nineteenth century, certainly where the study of social phenomena was concerned.


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