Jouffroy, and their compeers. The great treatise of M. Comte was
scarcely mentioned in French literature or criticism, when it was
already working powerfully on the minds of many British students and
thinkers. But, agreeably to the usual course of things in France, the
new tendency, when it set in, set in more strongly. Those who call
themselves Positivists are indeed not numerous; but all French writers
who adhere to the common philosophy, now feel it necessary to begin by
fortifying their position against "the Positivist school." And the mode
of thinking thus designated is already manifesting its importance by one
of the most unequivocal signs, the appearance of thinkers who attempt a
compromise or _juste milieu_ between it and its opposite. The acute
critic and metaphysician M. Taine, and the distinguished chemist M.
Berthelot, are the authors of the two most conspicuous of these
attempts.

The time, therefore, seems to have come, when every philosophic thinker
not only ought to form, but may usefully express, a judgment respecting
this intellectual movement; endeavouring to understand what it is,
whether it is essentially a wholesome movement, and if so, what is to be
accepted and what rejected of the direction given to it by its most
important movers. There cannot be a more appropriate mode of discussing
these points than in the form of a critical examination of the
philosophy of Auguste Comte; for which the appearance of a new edition
of his fundamental treatise, with a preface by the most eminent, in
every point of view, of his professed disciples, M. Littre, affords a
good opportunity. The name of M. Comte is more identified than any other
with this mode of thought. He is the first who has attempted its
complete systematization, and the scientific extension of it to all
objects of human knowledge. And in doing this he has displayed a
quantity and quality of mental power, and achieved an amount of success,
which have not only won but retained the high admiration of thinkers as
radically and strenuously opposed as it is possible to be, to nearly the
whole of his later tendencies, and to many of his earlier opinions. It
would have been a mistake had such thinkers busied themselves in the
first instance with drawing attention to what they regarded as errors in
his great work. Until it had taken the place in the world of thought
which belonged to it, the important matter was not to criticise it, but
to help in makin