In 1857 he was attacked by cancer, and died peaceably on the 5th of September of that year. The anniversary is always celebrated by ceremonial gatherings of his French and English followers, who then commemorate the name and the services of the founder of their religion. Comte was under sixty when he died. We cannot help reflecting that one of the worst of all the evils connected with the shortness of human life is the impatience that it breeds in some of the most ardent and enlightened minds to hurry on the execution of projects, for which neither the time nor the spirit of their author is fully ripe. In proceeding to give an outline of Comte's system, we shall consider the _Positive Polity_ as the more or less legitimate sequel of the _Positive Philosophy_, notwithstanding the deep gulf which so eminent a critic as Mr. Mill insisted upon fixing between the earlier and the later work.[2] There may be, as we think there is, the greatest difference in their value, and the temper is not the same, nor the method. But the two are quite capable of being regarded, and for the purposes of an account of Comte's career ought to be regarded, as an integral whole. His letters when he was a young man of one and twenty, and before he had published a word, show how strongly present the social motive was in his mind, and in what little account he should hold his scientific works, if he did not perpetually think of their utility for the species. 'I feel,' he wrote, 'that such scientific reputation as I might acquire would give more value, more weight, more useful influence to my political sermons.' In 1822 he published a _Plan of the Scientific Works necessary to Reorganise Society_. In this opuscule he points out that modern society is passing through a great crisis, due to the conflict of two opposing movements,--the first, a disorganising movement owing to the break-up of old institutions and beliefs; the second, a movement towards a definite social state, in which all means of human prosperity will receive their most complete development and most direct application. How is this crisis to be dealt with? What are the undertakings necessary in order to pass successfully through it towards an organic state? The answer to this is that there are two series of works. The first is theoretic or spiritual, aiming at the development of a new principle of co-ordinating social relations and the formation of the system of general ideas which are destined to guide society. The second work is practical or temporal; it settles the distribution of power and the institutions that are most conformable to the spirit of the system which has previously been thought out in the course of the theoretic work. As the practical work depends on the conclusions of the theoretical, the latter must obviously come first in order of execution.