simply impossible. He may do eminent service by
elaborating certain sides of the truth, but he must expect to find that
there are other sides which have wholly escaped his attention. However
great his powers, everything that he can do without the aid of incessant
remindings from other thinkers, is merely provisional, and will require
a thorough revision. He ought to be aware of this, and accept it with
his eyes open, regarding himself as a pioneer, not a constructor. If he
thinks that he can contribute most towards the elements of the final
synthesis by following out his own original thoughts as far as they will
go, leaving to other thinkers, or to himself at a subsequent time, the
business of adjusting them to the thoughts by which they ought to be
accompanied, he is right in doing so. But he deludes himself if he
imagines that any conclusions he can arrive at, while he practises M.
Comte's rule of _hygiene cerebrale_, can possibly be definitive.

Neither is such a practice, in a hygienic point of view, free from the
gravest dangers to the philosopher's own mind. When once he has
persuaded himself that he can work out the final truth on any subject,
exclusively from his own sources, he is apt to lose all measure or
standard by which to be apprized when he is departing from common sense.
Living only with his own thoughts, he gradually forgets the aspect they
present to minds of a different mould from his own; he looks at his
conclusions only from the point of view which suggested them, and from
which they naturally appear perfect; and every consideration which from
other points of view might present itself, either as an objection or as
a necessary modification, is to him as if it did not exist. When his
merits come to be recognised and appreciated, and especially if he
obtains disciples, the intellectual infirmity soon becomes complicated
with a moral one. The natural result of the position is a gigantic
self-confidence, not to say self-conceit. That of M. Comte is colossal.
Except here and there in an entirely self-taught thinker, who has no
high standard with which to compare himself, we have met with nothing
approaching to it. As his thoughts grew more extravagant, his
self-confidence grew more outrageous. The height it ultimately attained
must be seen, in his writings, to be believed.

The other circumstance of a personal nature which it is impossible not
to notice, because M. Comte is perpetually referring to it a