The term _positive philosophy_ had long been used by Saint-Simon and his school, Comte among the rest, not in the special sense that the latter now gave it, but as a “generic name for the whole of science.” The first use of the words as we now understand them is in a letter from Comte to M. d’Eichthal, dated Aug. 5, 1824. “I cannot help recalling your judicious reflection upon the influence that social physics, once formed, will have upon scientific philosophy. I go even further than you, for I think that it will be only then that a veritable philosophy of the sciences can exist. All the philosophical ideas that are there to-day, although very precious up to that time, appear to me to have nothing more than a simply provisory (provisoire) character. I shall speak a little about this relation in the general preface that I announce to you, where I shall explain that the true title of my work would be _positive philosophy_, and that if I preferred _politics_, it is because that is the most urgent philosophical application and the one that is to found the science, but that later I or you or others will complete this system of ideas by the encyclopedic re-coinage of all our positive cognitions (connaissances), which ought really to be conceived as a single mass, although, for good culture, it is indispensable to preserve and to push even, in one sense, further than it is, the division of labor, so that each special savant can always, subsequently, conceive the relation of his branch and even of his twig to the universal trunk.” In a letter of about this date Comte refers to his habit of never rewriting anything. His memory permitted him to look upon a volume as finished when it had been thought out and before a line had been written. But even in his letters we notice some of the disadvantages of this procedure, which, while conducive to unity, sacrifices literary form. It is true that Comte studied under Saint-Simon; but, according to Littré, his purely philosophical dependence was very slight, while his influence upon his master was important. “What forms the distinguishing characteristic of Saint-Simon at the epoch when he lived, is the social destination that he assigns without hesitating to the ideas that preoccupy him. He has, as we have seen, only the most confused notion of what this philosophy will be; but, no matter what it is to be, he consecrates it in advance to the reorganisation of society.” As regards Condorcet, Comte enthusiastically acknowledges his indebtedness to the “Sketch of an Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind,” and even goes beyond the facts, as he did in his praise of Kant.