LAMENNAIS.--Lamennais, long celebrated for his great book, _Essay on Indifference in the Matter of Religion_, then, when he had severed himself from Rome, by his _Words of a Believer_ and other works of revolutionary spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was a philosopher, properly speaking, in his _Sketch of a Philosophy_. To him, God is neither the Creator, as understood by the early Christians, nor the Being from whom the world emanates, as others have thought. He has not created the world from nothing; but He has created it; He created it from Himself, He made it issue from His substance; and He made it issue by a purely voluntary act. He created it in His own image; it is not man alone who is in the image of God, but the whole world. The three Persons of God, that is, the three characteristics, power, intelligence, and love are found--diminished and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found--in every being in the universe. They are especially our own three powers, under the form of will, reason, sympathy; they are also the three powers of society, under the forms of executive power, deliberation, and fraternity. Every being, individual or collective, has in it a principle of death if it cannot reproduce however imperfectly all the three terms of this trinity without the loss of one. AUGUSTE COMTE.--Auguste Comte, a mathematician, versed also in all sciences, constructed a pre-eminently negative philosophy in spite of his great pretension to replace the negations of the eighteenth century by a positive doctrine; above all else he denied all authority and denied to metaphysics the right of existence. Metaphysics ought not to exist, do not exist, are a mere nothing. We know nothing, we can know nothing, about the commencement or the end of things, or yet their essence or their object; philosophy has always laid down as its task a general explanation of the universe; it is precisely this general explanation, all general explanation of the aggregate of things, which is impossible. This is the negative part of "positivism." It is the only one which has endured and which is the _credo_ or rather the _non credo_ of a fairly large number of minds.