At the time of Saint-Simon's death, which happened five years before the Revolution of July, these ideas were only known to and adopted by a small circle, but during the reign of Louis Philippe they spread rapidly, undergoing various alterations during the process. A Saint-Simonist sect was founded, a sect with a high-priest and with eminent men of all classes and professions amongst its numbers, such men as Isaac Péreire, the financier, and Félicien David, the musical composer. In the end the Saint-Simonist ideas penetrated the whole of French society; through Michel Chevalier they became elements of political economy; they inspired the most eminent historian of the day, Augustin Thierry; they lay at the foundation of the philosophy of the greatest French thinker of the century, Auguste Comte; with certain modifications they won, in Pierre Leroux and Lamennais, influential philosophic and religious apostles; and at the same time they made their way into poetry. And there was nothing marvellous in all this, for, in spite of his extravagances, Saint-Simon undoubtedly had something of the prophetic instinct of the great poet. He was in advance of his age; for his philosophy is one of the signs of the great European reaction against the eighteenth century, which he regarded as a purely critical, purely disintegrative period, whilst he denominated the nineteenth an organic, directly productive period. He disagreed as entirely with those who imagined that the happiness of humanity can be produced by a mere change in the forms of government as with those who, like the church party, exalted the past in order to bring it back again. He was not the friend of the past, but the herald of the future; the aims and endeavours of the reaction appeared to him only in so far reasonable and right as they arose from a perception of the truth that mankind cannot be civilised by mere reason, that religion is indispensable to civilisation--the religion desiderated by Saint-Simon being, however, one divested of the conventions and externalities of all the existing religions. Possessed, as he was, not with the spirit of doubt, but with the reformer's enthusiasm, the liberty which consisted in emancipation from restraints seemed to him of little value if it were not complemented and completed by true, perfect liberty, that is to say, by an ever greater, wider capability. The work of the last, the critical, centuries had been the destruction of the medieval power of the priest and the warrior; now the time had come to establish the reign of science and industry. In the new order of society science was destined to take the place of faith, industry of war. The first thing to be done was to "organise" science and industry.