Auguste Comte, born 1798, married at the age of twenty-seven and was divorced at forty-four. He experienced losses by the failure of his publisher and had his first crisis when he was forty. He met Clotilde de Vaux when he was forty-seven but she died a year later. He then became the high priest of humanity, developing his _Politique Positive_ and a new religion. His father, a government official, had given him an excellent scientific education, but during his early years his emotional life was entirely undeveloped and this now took the ascendency.[12] Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688. He had his first vision in London in 1745 at the age of 57, became a seer and mystic, and changed from a subjective to an objective type of thought and developed his doctrine of correspondencies. The change was due to overwork and eye-strain, as was the case with Comte.[13] Giovanni Segantini[14] affords us perhaps the very best picture of a man who died at the age of forty-three of what might be called meridional mental fever. His life was a struggle against an obsessive death thought and a compensatory will-to-live. His first painting, at the age of twelve, was of a child’s corpse, which he tried to paint back into life. Haunted by the idealized image of his mother, who died when he was very young, and which he fancied he at length found in a peasant girl whom he made his model for years, this life-affirming motif was always in conflict with the thought of death, which in later years became an obsession. His struggle for sublimation was typified by his removal from the world and retirement to a high Alpine village where the mountains, in the ideal of which it was his final ambition to embody all the excelsior motives of life, so drew him that he had a passion for exploring their heights and once slept in the snow, to the permanent impairment of his health. He had several narrow escapes from death, which afterwards always provoked greater activity. He painted an upright corpse, the fall of which he thought (with the characteristic superstition of neurotics) was ominous. Death became, in the end, his muse as his mother had been in the earlier stages of his development. He seemed fascinated with the idea of anticipating death in every way, even though this was a more or less unconscious urge. It was as if he revolted against the ordinary fate of man to await its gradual approach with the soporific agencies that old age normally supplies, and was anxious to go forth and meet it face to face at the very summit of his powers. At times he let down all precautions and took great risks, so characteristic a result of acute disappointments or of general disenchantment with life.