The grievances brought forward by Comte are only of secondary importance. As a matter of fact master and pupil were bound to separate sooner or later. There was a radical incompatibility between those two minds. Saint-Simon, marvellously inventive and original, throws out a multitude of new ideas and views, of which many will be fruitful. But he quickly affirms, and proves little. He has not the patience to continue working long at the same subject, or to probe it to the bottom in an orderly way. Comte, on the contrary, thinks with Descartes, that method is essential to science, and that “logical coherence” is the surest sign of truth. He could not long remain satisfied with Saint-Simon’s disconnected essays. He could even, without dishonesty, turn to account the brilliant but disorderly intuition in which his master abounds and believe that his own doctrine alone gave those disconnected essays scientific value, because his doctrine alone was in a position to systematise them and to connect them with their principles. It would therefore seem that we can admit at the same time that Saint-Simon’s influence upon Comte was considerable, and, on the other hand, that Comte’s philosophical originality is no less certain. Saint-Simon’s influence would chiefly have consisted: 1. in suggesting to Comte a certain number of general ideas and of views of detail, especially for his philosophy of history; 2. in showing him how the two orders of labours which he had been following until then were to blend into a single one, through the creation of a _science_ which would be social, and consequently of a _polity_ which would be scientific. Would this synthesis of the two orders of studies which Comte had undertaken side by side have been produced in his mind, had he not known Saint-Simon? In any case it would have been produced more slowly. Let us at least leave Saint-Simon the credit which Comte himself granted him, that of having “started” his disciple upon the line best suited to his genius.