literary interest, are philosophy,
theology, and history. In philosophy France has produced, during the
present century, only one name of the first importance. As has been the
case with all other European nations, her philosophical energies have
chiefly been devoted to the historical side of philosophy, a tendency
specially encouraged by the already-mentioned influence of Cousin.
Damiron, the chief authority in French on the materialist schools of the
eighteenth century; M. Jules Simon and Vacherot, who busied themselves
chiefly with the Alexandrian philosophers--Cousin it should be
remembered was the editor of Proclus--and Charles de Remusat, a man of
great capacity, who, among other rather unexpected literary
occupations, devoted himself to Abelard, Thomas a Becket, and other
representatives of scholasticism, illustrate this tendency. The
philosophy of the middle ages was also the subject of one of the
clearest and best-written of philosophical studies, the _De la
Philosophie Scolastique_ of B. Haureau. The name, however, of the
century in French philosophical literature is that of Auguste Comte, the
founder of what is called Positivism. He was born at Montpelier three or
four years before the end of the last century, and died at Paris in
September, 1857. Comte passed through the discipline of initiation in
the Saint Simonian views--Saint Simon was a descendant of the great
writer of that name, who developed a curious form of communism very
interesting politically, but important to literature only from the
remarkable influence it had upon his contemporaries--but, like most of
Saint Simon's disciples, soon emancipated himself. To discuss Comte's
philosophical views would be impossible here. It is sufficient to say
that the cardinal principle of his earlier work, the _Cours de
Philosophie Positive_, is that the world of thought has passed through
successively a theological stage and a metaphysical stage, and is now
reduced to the observation and classification of phenomena and their
relations. On the basis cleared by this sweeping hypothesis, Comte, in
his later days (under the inspiration of a lady, Madame Clotilde de
Vaux, if he himself be believed), developed a remarkable construction of
positive religion. This was indignantly rejected by his most acute
followers, the chief of whom was the philologist and critic Littre.
Outside of Comtism, France has not produced many writers on philosophy,
except philosophical histor