The chief work which this undoubtedly great mind accomplished was the organisation of the scientific spirit as it appeared in his time. Renan hardly does justice to him in his sarcastic remark in his _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_. “I felt quite irritated at the idea of Auguste Comte being dignified with the title of a great man for having expressed in bad French what all scientific minds had seen for the last two hundred years as clearly as he had done.” His work merits more than dismissal in such a tone, and we may here note, as the essence of the spirit which he tried to express, his definition of the positive or scientific attitude to the universe given at the commencement of his celebrated Cours de _Philosophie positive_. There, in defining the positive stage, Comte speaks of it as that period in which “the human spirit, recognising the impossibility of obtaining absolute conceptions, abandons the search for the origin and the goal of the universe and the inner causes of things, to set itself the task merely of discovering, by reasoning and by experience combined, the effective laws of phenomena—that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and of similarity.”[6] This positive spirit Comte strove to express rather than to originate, for it was already there in the sciences. Undoubtedly his work made it more prominent, more clear, and so we have to note an interaction between positivism in the sciences and in philosophy. [6] Leçon i. It is equally important for our purpose to notice that the period was one rich in scientific thought. The work of Lavoisier and Bichat, both of whom as contemporaries of Maine de Biran, belong to the former century, was now bearing fruit. Lavoisier’s influence had been great over chemistry, which he established on a modern basis, by formulating the important theory of the conservation of mass and by clearing away false and fan- tastic conceptions regarding combustion.[7] Bichat, the great anatomist and physiologist, died in 1802, but the publication of his works in a completed form was not accomplished until 1854. The work and influence of the _Académie des Sciences_ are noteworthy features of French culture at this time. There stands out prominently the highly important work of Cuvier in anatomy, zoology and palæontology.[8] The nineteenth century was a period of great scientists and of great scientific theories. Leverrier, applying himself to the problem of the motions of Uranus, found a solution in the hypothesis of another planet, Neptune, which was actually discovered from his calculations in 1846. This was a notable victory for logical and scientific method. In 1809 Lamarck had outlined, prior to Spencer or Darwin, the scheme of the evolutionary theory (Transformism).[9] Spencer’s work, which appeared from 1850 onwards, has always commanded respect and attention in France even among its critics.[10] Interest increased upon the