that he wrote with opium on a page of lead. The general
effect is impressive, not by any virtues of style, for we do not
discern one, but by reason of the magnitude and importance of the
undertaking, and the visible conscientiousness and the grasp with
which it is executed. It is by sheer strength of thought, by the
vigorous perspicacity with which he strikes the lines of cleavage of
his subject, that he makes his way into the mind of the reader; in the
presence of gifts of this power we need not quarrel with an ungainly
style.

Comte pursued one practice which ought to be mentioned in connection
with his personal history, the practice of what he styled _hygiene
cerebrale_. After he had acquired what he considered to be a
sufficient stock of material, and this happened before he had
completed the _Positive Philosophy_, he abstained deliberately and
scrupulously from reading newspapers, reviews, scientific
transactions, and everything else whatever, except two or three poets
(notably Dante) and the _Imitatio Christi_. It is true that his
friends kept him informed of what was going on in the scientific
world. Still this partial divorce of himself from the record of the
social and scientific activity of his time, though it may save a
thinker from the deplorable evils of dispersion, moral and
intellectual, accounts in no small measure for the exaggerated egoism,
and the absence of all feeling for reality, which marked Comte's later
days.

Only one important incident in Comte's life now remains to be spoken
of. In 1845 he made the acquaintance of Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a
lady whose husband had been sent to the galleys for life, and who was
therefore, in all but the legal incidents of her position, a widow.
Very little is known about her qualities. She wrote a little piece
which Comte rated so preposterously as to talk about George Sand in
the same sentence; it is in truth a flimsy performance, though it
contains one or two gracious thoughts. There is true beauty in the
saying--_'It is unworthy of a noble nature to diffuse its pain.'_
Madame de Vaux's letters speak well for her good sense and good
feeling, and it would have been better for Comte's later work if she
had survived to exert a wholesome restraint on his exaltation. Their
friendship had only lasted a year when she died (1846), but the period
was long enough to give her memory a supreme ascendency in Comte's
mind. Condillac, Joubert, Mill, and other eminent me