Great, however, was my perplexity, not to say disappointment, as I followed the progress of this "mighty son of earth" in his work of reconstruction. Undoubtedly "Dieu" disappeared, but the "Nouveau Grand-Etre Supreme," a gigantic fetish, turned out bran-new by M. Comte's own hands, reigned in his stead. "Roi" also was not heard of; but, in his place, I found a minutely-defined social organization, which, if it ever came into practice, would exert a despotic authority such as no sultan has rivalled, and no Puritan presbytery, in its palmiest days, could hope to excel. While, as for the "culte systematique de l'Humanite," I, in my blindness, could not distinguish it from sheer Popery, with M. Comte in the chair of St. Peter, and the names of most of the saints changed. To quote "Faust" again, I found myself saying with Gretchen,-- "Ungefaehr sagt das der Pfarrer auch Nur mit ein bischen andern Worten." Rightly or wrongly, this was the impression which, all those years ago, the study of M. Comte's works left on my mind, combined with the conviction, which I shall always be thankful to him for awakening in me, that the organization of society upon a new and purely scientific basis is not only practicable, but is the only political object much worth fighting for. As I have said, that part of M. Comte's writings which deals with the philosophy of physical science appeared to me to possess singularly little value, and to show that he had but the most superficial, and merely second-hand, knowledge of most branches of what is usually understood by science. I do not mean by this merely to say that Comte was behind our present knowledge, or that he was unacquainted with the details of the science of his own day. No one could justly make such defects cause of complaint in a philosophical writer of the past generation. What struck me was his want of apprehension of the great features of science; his strange mistakes as to the merits of his scientific contemporaries; and his ludicrously erroneous notions about the part which some of the scientific doctrines current in his time were destined to play in the future. With these impressions in my mind, no one will be surprised if I acknowledge that, for these sixteen years, it has been a periodical source of irritation to me to find M. Comte put forward as a representative of scientific thought; and to observe that writers whose philosophy had its legitimate parent in Hume, or in themselves, were labelled "Comtists" or "Positivists" by public writers, even in spite of vehement protests to the contrary. It has cost Mr. Mill hard rubbings to get that label off; and I watch Mr. Spencer, as one regards a good man struggling with adversity, still engaged in eluding its adhesiveness, and ready to tear away skin and all, rather than let it stick. My own turn might come next; and, therefore, when an eminent prelate the other day gave currency and authority to the popular