n have shown what
the intellectual ascendency of a woman can be. Comte was as
inconsolable after Madame de Vaux's death as D'Alembert after the
death of Mademoiselle L'Espinasse. Every Wednesday afternoon he made a
reverential pilgrimage to her tomb, and three times every day he
invoked her memory in words of passionate expansion. His disciples
believe that in time the world will reverence Comte's sentiment about
Clotilde de Vaux, as it reveres Dante's adoration of Beatrice--a
parallel that Comte himself was the first to hit upon. It is no doubt
the worst kind of cynicism to make a mock in a realistic vein of any
personality that has set in motion the idealising thaumaturgy of the
affections. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and
unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole
world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their
place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet. Only an
energetic and beautiful imagination, together with a mastery of the
rhythm and swell of impassioned speech, can prevent an invitation to
the public to hearken to the raptures of intense personal attachment
from seeming ludicrous and almost indecent. Whatever other gifts Comte
may have had--and he had many of the rarest kind,--poetic imagination
was not among them, any more than poetic or emotional expression was
among them. His was one of those natures whose faculty of deep feeling
is unhappily doomed to be inarticulate, and to pass away without the
magic power of transmitting itself.

Comte lost no time, after the completion of his _Course of Positive
Philosophy_, in proceeding with the _System of Positive Polity_, to
which the earlier work was designed to be a foundation. The first
volume was published in 1851, and the fourth and last in 1854. In
1848, when the political air was charged with stimulating elements, he
founded the Positive Society, with the expectation that it might grow
into a reunion as powerful over the new revolution as the Jacobin Club
had been in the revolution of 1789. The hope was not fulfilled, but a
certain number of philosophic disciples gathered round Comte, and
eventually formed themselves, under the guidance of the new ideas of
the latter half of his life, into a kind of church. In the years 1849,
1850, and 1851, Comte gave three courses of lectures at the Palais
Royal. They were gratuitous and popular, and in them he boldly
advanced the whole