Three years later he took his doctor's degree. His formal essay on this occasion gained him considerable reputation. It was entitled _De la Génération des Éléments Anatomiques_, and proved not only that he had worked hard on the lines of his profession but that he was capable of taking an original view of the subjects he had mastered. This work has been throughout the basis of Clemenceau's medical, social, political and literary career. I got the book not long ago from the London Library, and on the title-page of this first edition I read in the author's own bold handwriting, "_A Monsieur J. Stuart Mill hommage respectueux de l'auteur G. Clemenceau_": a tribute to that eclectic philosopher and thinker which he followed up shortly afterwards by translating Mill's study of Auguste Comte and Positivism into French. Clemenceau was no great admirer of Comte, and specially disapproved of the attempt of some of that author's pupils and followers to limit investigation and cultivate agnosticism on matters which they considered fell without the bounds of their master's theories and categories. "We are not of those," writes Clemenceau, "who admit with the Positivist that science can give us no information on the enigma of things." This seems scarcely just to the modern Positivists, for although Comte himself wished to restrict mankind from the study of astronomy, for example, outside of the solar system, they have been as ready as the rest of the world to take advantage of discoveries beyond that system which throw light upon some of the difficult material problems nearer at hand. And Clemenceau, too, appears to fall into the line of reasoning with which he reproaches Comte; for, as will be seen later, he views nature as a mass of matter evolving and differentiating and organising and vivifying itself with the interminable antagonisms and mutual devourings of the various forms of existence on this planet, and possibly on other worlds of the infinitely little, and then, when the great suns die out, disappearing and beginning all over again as two of these huge extinguished luminaries collide in space. This material philosophy, when carried to its ultimate issue, still answers no question and furnishes no clue to the strange inexplicable movement of the universe in which man is but a sentient and partially intelligent automaton. What explanation does this give of any of the problems of social or individual ethic, or of the impulse which led Clemenceau the doctor to treat his patients in Montmartre gratuitously, instead of building up a valuable practice in a rich quarter? and urged Clemenceau the politician to pass the greater part of his life in an uphill fight against the domination of the sordid minority and the timid acquiescence of the apathetic masses rather than accept the high positions which were pressed upon him time after time?