By his _Politique positive_ Comte only represents his generation. By his philosophy properly so called he is a “representative man” of his entire century. Is it necessary to prove this? The intellectual history of our age witnesses to it at every step. Of all the systems which found birth in France in the XIX. century, this one alone found a hearing beyond the frontiers and left a deep impression upon foreign thinkers. Comte’s philosophy was at first received in England and in Holland even with more sympathy than in France. John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Lewes, George Elliot and a number of English philosophers and writers drew more or less of their inspiration from it. To this day, it is defended by men of great talent in England. It is true that no German philosopher had the same personal relations with Comte as John Stuart Mill, but as a matter of fact, for thirty years the positive spirit has gradually gained ground in the German Universities. To be convinced of this, it is enough to see how metaphysics are set aside in them and to observe the lines on which the moral and social sciences are taught. In the Latin countries of the two hemispheres Comte’s influence has been exercised with even greater strength, in Spain, in Portugal, in South America; and North America has also its Positivist societies. In his life time, Comte had already found there some of his most devoted disciples. In France the principal “vehicles” of Positivist philosophy have been the works of two writers who, in their time, were those most beloved by the public; Renan and Taine, although they were not positivists, have perhaps done more for the diffusion of the ideas and method of Comte than Littré and all the other positivists together. It is true that Taine owes a great deal to Spinoza and to Hegel, and more still to Condillac. Among his contemporaries he seems to be especially connected with John Stuart Mill and Spencer. But through them it is from Comte that he proceeds, and there we find the origin of the greater number of his leading ideas. His conception of literary history, of criticism, of the philosophy of art, in a word, his effort to bring into the study of the moral sciences the method used in the natural sciences, all this is chiefly derived from Auguste Comte. The _Histoire de la Litterature anglaise_ is, in a sense, an application of the positive theory according to which the evolution of the arts and literatures is governed by necessary laws which constitute its solidarity with that of morals, of institutions and of beliefs. The theory of the “moment” and of the “milieu” which is the chief one in Taine’s work was certainly not unknown in the XVIII. century. But it is Comte who generalised it by bringing Lamarck nearer to Montesquieu; it is he who taught Taine the general definition, at once biological and social, of the idea of the “milieu.”