Demurring, then, to Mr. Huxley’s opinion on this matter, and postponing remark on the doctrines to which he alludes, I must express a hearty concurrence with every word he utters on Comte. In him I too “find little or nothing of any scientific value.” I too have been lost in the mere mirage and sands of “those dreary and verbose pages;” and I acknowledge in Mr. Huxley’s every word the ring of a genuine experience. M. Comte was certainly a man of some mathematical and scientific proficiency, as well as of quick but biased intelligence. A member of the _Aufklärung_, he had seen the immense advance of physical science since Newton, under, as is usually said, the method of Bacon; and, like Hume, like Reid, like Kant, _who had all anticipated him in this_, he sought to transfer that method to the domain of mind. In this he failed; and though in a sociological aspect he is not without true glances into the present disintegration of society and the conditions of it, anything of importance cannot be claimed for him. There is not a sentence in his book that, in the hollow elaboration and windy pretentiousness of its build, is not an exact type of its own constructor. On the whole, indeed, when we consider the little to which he attained, the empty inflation of his claims, the monstrous and maniacal self-conceit into which he was _exalted_, it may appear, perhaps, that charity to M. Comte himself, to say nothing of the world, should induce us to wish that both his name and his works were buried in oblivion. Now, truly, that Mr. Huxley (the “call” being for the moment his) has so pronounced himself, especially as the facts of the case are exactly and absolutely what he indicates, perhaps we may expect this consummation not to be so very long delayed. More than those members of the revulsion already mentioned, one is apt to suspect, will be anxious now to beat a retreat. Not that this, however, is so certain to be allowed them; for their estimate of M. Comte is a valuable element in the estimate of themselves.