Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the scientific spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his results, yet struck out suggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857), who was associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by them to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consists of a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. The quickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship with Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of his earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt the need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds from the theory that all human conceptions advance from the primitive theological state, through the metaphysical--when abstract forces, occult causes, scholastic entities are invented to explain the phenomena of nature--to the positive, when at length it is recognised that human knowledge cannot pass beyond the region of phenomena. With these stages corresponds the progress of society from militarism, aggressive or defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract sciences--those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than with the application of laws--are so arranged by Comte as to exhibit each more complex science resting on a simpler, to which it adds a new order of truths; the whole erection, ascending to the science of sociology, which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrine of human society--a doctrine of the laws of progress as well as of the laws of order--is crowned by morals. In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power is entrusted to a priesthood of science. Their moral influence will be chiefly directed to reinforcing the social feeling, altruism, as against the predominance of self-love. The object of religious reverence is not God, but the "Great Being"--Humanity, the society of the noble living and the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity, of all those who contribute to the better life of man. To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our gratitude, we render our homage, we direct our aspirations; for Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination of egoistic desire. Women--the mother, the wife, the daughter--purifying through affection the energies of man, act, under the Great Being, as angelic guardians, accomplishing a moral providence.