Why need I appeal to history for a proof of the simultaneous and indestructible co-existence of these different conditions of humanity, among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to admit more than one as rational and definitive? M. Comte has himself undertaken--he alone--to furnish me with this proof. This intractable adversary of all religious belief and tendency could not, even for the short space of this life, himself remain indifferent to such belief and tendency; during this brief period he traversed, and in the inverse order of his own theories, each of the different intellectual states which he had assigned as the successive stages of the human race. He had placed the theological state at the beginning and the scientific state at the close of the career of humanity; after having made his own _début_ by the scientific state, it was as impossible for him, as it is for the human race, to content himself with that, and he himself ended there, where, according to him, mankind had commenced, namely, with the theological state. He had declared his positive philosophy to be "in radical and absolute contradiction to every kind of religious or metaphysical tendency." {305} He had separated with _éclat_ from the Saint-Simonians, "for they will soon," he said, "sink themselves in ridicule and contempt. Only imagine, their heads are turned to such a degree, that they propose nothing less than the establishment of a real, new religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in the person of Saint-Simon." [Footnote 61] [Footnote 61: Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave d'Eichthal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M. Littré, p. 173.]