Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents, dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather the air of a high priest of humanity, legislating concerning a new religion. It is but fair to say that at this point Littré and many others parted company with Comte. He developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in its devotion to the positivists' religion--the worship of humanity. He was the friend and counsellor of working-men and agitators, of little children, of the poor and miserable. He ended his rather pathetic and turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few disciples about his bed as he remembered that Socrates had done.