Comte's life has been written by friend and foe. For fulness of detail the right book is by his disciple and executor, Dr. Robinet, who has just figured among those who rule in the Commune of Paris. Robinet is very interesting, for he thoroughly believes in his master, and accepts the whole Comtist religion, calendar and all, which Littré and others reject. No reproach this to Comte's biographer, for that same worship is celebrated in our cooler atmosphere of England. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ has, by its notices, made the celebrations widely known. There is an account of the grandest yearly solemnity which will suffice many, and excite the curiosity of more, in its number for January 7th, 1868. It is not hard to see that the worshippers differ from the recusants by a strong feeling that they cannot live upon axioms sounding like negatives. They want sentiment, emotion, excitement to sustain them. Let us observe how Comte caught the first glimpse of this requirement. His life was sombre--a boy delicate and fractious, disliked by his masters, turned out of the Polytechnique, repudiated by his great socialist teacher St. Simon. His family relations not happy, his marriage least of all. We cannot wonder at vagaries, for he had a real fit of rampant insanity, and after release from an asylum had nearly drowned himself in the Seine. His wife found him intolerable, and left her home. Mr. Mill speaks of her respect for him;--it was oddly testified after his death, for she pleads in law that he was a madman, an atheist, and immoral; repudiates his will, and seizes the consecrated relics of his dwelling. Littré supported her against those who, like Robinet, thought her little less than blasphemous. If she had appeared in an English law court, we should have known more truth than we do. Let us now look at such facts as we have from the more favourable side. The man lived a lonely life, as became a sort of conceptual alchemist, sustained by a belief that he was turning men's leaden thoughts into his own pure gold. One brilliant projection of his has made him the idol of Positivists. I confess it puzzles me, among many others, to imagine how a qualified critic can treat such a philosophic solvent either as true or as original. It supposes the history of all human thinking to pass necessarily through three stages, theology, metaphysics, positive truth; and that the world makes progress accordingly. We will hope that the thing called theology, a benighted belief in the government and intervention of supreme will, is not altogether extinct in this age of progress; if it be so, Mr. Froude encourages us to look for a revival. Among lesser matters, the hypothesis of metaphysical cookery is an idea one fails to realise. Was it a banquet with joints cut Laputa-like, after some fashion of concepts, or syllogistic figures? Was it a "feast of reason and a flow of soul," or, more probably, an abstraction pure and simple, as if a man could