Some thirty or forty years ago, in France, Auguste Comte—a pupil {76} of the _Ecole Polytechnique_, who had remained for years at that establishment as a _repetiteur_ of Transcendant Analysis and Rationalistic Mechanics—awoke one fine morning with the very irrational idea of becoming a prophet. In America, prophets can be met with at every street-corner; in Europe, they are as rare as black swans. But France is the land of novelties. Auguste Comte became a prophet; and so infectious is fashion, sometimes, that even in sober England he was considered, for a certain time, the Newton of the nineteenth century. The epidemic extended, and for the time being, it spread like wildfire over Germany, England, and America. It found adepts in France, but the excitement did not last long with these. The prophet needed money: the disciples were unwilling to furnish it. The fever of admiration for a religion without a God cooled off as quickly as it had come on; of all the enthusiastic apostles of the prophet, there remained but one worthy any attention. It was the famous philologist Littré, a member of the French Institute, and a _would-be_ member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, but whom the archbishop of Orleans maliciously prevented from becoming one of the “Immortals.”[152] The philosopher-mathematician—the high-priest of the “religion of the future” taught his doctrine as do all his brother-prophets of our modern days. He deified “woman,” and furnished her with an altar; but the goddess had to pay for its use. The rationalists had laughed at the mental aberration of Fourier; they had laughed at the St. Simonists; and their scorn for Spiritualism knew no bounds. The same rationalists and materialists were caught, like so many empty-headed sparrows, by the bird-lime of the new prophet’s rhetoric. A longing for some kind of divinity, a craving for the “unknown,” is a feeling congenital in man; hence the worst atheists seem not to be exempt from it. Deceived by the outward brilliancy of this _ignus fatuus_, the disciples followed it until they found themselves floundering in a bottomless morass. Covering themselves with the mask of a pretended erudition, the Positivists of this country have organized themselves into clubs and committees with the design of uprooting Spiritualism, while pretending to impartially investigate it.