One can scarcely refrain from a smile when he contemplates these dreams reduced to the form of system, ignoring every sentiment of reality, and expounded with the confidence of fanaticism in the name of a science called Positive. Here it is that we find the fixed and dominant idea that pervaded and compromised the whole life of M. Auguste Comte. Whoever did not accept his doctrine and his system, was for him either a retrogradist full of prejudice, or an ignoramus without scientific education, or an interested and jealous enemy. Whoever, on the other hand, lent himself to his views on any point, or for any time, however short, became in the eyes of M. Comte his conquest and his property, his philosophical serf, as it were, bound to his master by the tenure of duty, and the render of services from which he could never hope to enfranchise himself, without the risk of being treated upon the instant as a deserter or a rebel, and of seeing at once broken the closest and most approved bonds of intimacy and friendship. {276} He had so entire a confidence in his own intellectual superiority, and in the rights which it conferred, that he expressed it sometimes with a _näiveté_ amounting almost to idolatry. One day, believing that he had won over to his ideas M. Armand Marrast, then the editor of the _National_, he wrote thus to his wife: "Marrast no longer feels any repugnance in admitting the indispensable fact of my intellectual superiority; he is in this respect, in my opinion, especially influenced by Mill, whom he holds, and with reason, in high account. To speak plainly and in general terms, I believe that, at the point at which I have now arrived, I have no occasion to do more than to continue to exist; the kind of preponderance which I covet cannot, henceforth, fail to devolve upon me." [Footnote 46] [Footnote 46: Letter of the 3d December, 1842: "Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive;" p. 324.] {277} Shortly after the date of this letter, M. Comte was separated from his wife and embroiled with Mr. Mill himself, who had not, as the former fancied, fulfilled toward him all the duties of an accepted and loyal disciple. I pass from the fixed idea of the man to the false idea of his system; it appears over and over again at each step in the "Cours de philosophie positive" of M. Auguste Comte, [Footnote 47] and in the imposing biography consecrated to his memory by his most accomplished disciple, M. Littré. [Footnote 48] [Footnote 47: Six volumes 8vo., published in the interval from 1830 to 1842 inclusive.] [Footnote 48: Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive. 8vo. 1863.] I extract from different parts of these volumes the passages in which the fundamental doctrine is most clearly expressed: "Positive philosophy is the whole body of human knowledge. Human knowledge is the result of the study of the forces belonging to matter, and of the conditions or laws governing those forces." [Footnote 49]