would have been perfectly justified in this serious apprehension. To
have done anything to make the production of the _Positive Polity_
easier would have been no ground for anything but remorse to any of
the three. It is just to Comte to remark that he always assumed that
the contributors to the support of a thinker should be in all
essentials of method and doctrine that thinker's disciples; aid from
indifferent persons he counted irrational and humiliating. But is an
endowment ever a blessing to the man who receives it? The question is
difficult to answer generally; in Comte's case there is reason in the
doubts felt by Madame Comte as to the expediency of relieving the
philosopher from the necessity of being in plain and business-like
relations with indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in
the week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep egoism
within decent bounds, and they must be not only a relief, but a
wholesome corrective to the tendencies of concentrated thinking on
abstract subjects.

What finally happened was this. From 1845 to 1848 Comte lived as best
he could, as well as made his wife her allowance, on an income of L200
a year. We need scarcely say that he was rigorously thrifty. His
little account books of income and outlay, with every item entered
down to a few hours before his death, are accurate and neat enough to
have satisfied an ancient Roman householder. In 1848, through no fault
of his own, his salary was reduced to L80. M. Littre and others, with
Comte's approval, published an appeal for subscriptions, and on the
money thus contributed Comte subsisted for the remaining nine years of
his life. By 1852 the subsidy produced as much as L200 a year. It is
worth noticing, after the story we have told, that Mr. Mill was one of
the subscribers, and that M. Littre continued his assistance after he
had been driven from Comte's society by his high pontifical airs. We
are sorry not to be able to record any similar trait of magnanimity on
Comte's part. His character, admirable as it is for firmness, for
intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought
the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities
that make us love good men and pity bad ones. He is of the type of
Brutus or of Cato--a model of austere fixity of purpose, but
ungracious, domineering, and not quite free from petty bitterness.

If you seek to place yourself in sympathy with Comte it is