FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143  
144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   >>   >|  
at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time to think--if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental impediment. The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution, save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who are great financiers. When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development. At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things, there was no hope for the race. The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to call his convictions. He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex. At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with the local cure; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and contradicted the preacher. His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French "Polytechnique" was purely a government institution--a sample of the Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth. But institutions are never much beyond the people--they can not be, for the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not embody public
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143  
144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
parents
 

father

 

taught

 

institution

 

peculiar

 
School
 
filled
 

Auguste

 
people
 

things


leisure

 

perverse

 
offered
 

publicly

 
rareripe
 

thirteen

 
closer
 
pleased
 

foolishness

 

brought


disannex

 

convictions

 

hearty

 

debate

 

interest

 

abstruse

 

obscure

 

wearied

 

brains

 

complex


meeting

 
Boston
 

America

 

served

 

founded

 
Napoleon
 

Technology

 
Century
 

Twentieth

 
institutions

benefit
 

Nineteenth

 
sample
 
government
 

French

 

Polytechnique

 
purely
 

excellent

 
contradicted
 

preacher