mathematical master in a school. A friend procured him a situation
as tutor in the house of Casimir Perier. The salary was good, but the
duties were too miscellaneous, and what was still worse, there was an
end of the delicious liberty of the garret. After a short experience
of three weeks Comte returned to neediness and contentment. He was not
altogether without the young man's appetite for pleasure; yet when he
was only nineteen we find him wondering, amid the gaieties of the
carnival of 1817, how a gavotte or a minuet could make people forget
that thirty thousand human beings around them had barely a morsel to
eat. Hardship in youth has many drawbacks, but it has the immense
advantage over academic ease of making the student's interest in men
real, and not merely literary.

Towards 1818 Comte became associated as friend and disciple with a man
who was destined to exercise a very decisive influence upon the turn
of his speculation. Henry, count of Saint Simon, was second cousin of
the famous duke of Saint Simon, the friend of the Regent, and author
of the most important set of memoirs in a language that is so
incomparably rich in memoirs. He was now nearly sixty, and if he had
not gained a serious reputation, he had at least excited the curiosity
and interest of his contemporaries by the social eccentricities of his
life, by the multitude of his schemes and devices, and by the
fantastic ingenuity of his political ideas. Saint Simon's most
characteristic faculty was an exuberant imagination, working in the
sphere of real things. Scientific discipline did nothing for him; he
had never undergone it, and he never felt its value. He was an artist
in social construction; and if right ideas, or the suggestion of right
ideas, sometimes came into his head, about history, about human
progress, about a stable polity, such ideas were not the products of
trains of ordered reasoning; they were the intuitional glimpses of the
poet, and consequently as they professed to be in real matter, even
the right ideas were as often as not accompanied by wrong ones.

The young Comte, now twenty, was enchanted by the philosophic veteran.
In after years he so far forgot himself as to write of Saint Simon as
a depraved quack, and to deplore his connection with him as purely
mischievous. While the connection lasted he thought very differently.
Saint Simon is described as the most estimable and lovable of men, and
the most delightful in his relat