t. He did not recover his health for more than a
year, and as soon as convalescence set in he was seized by so profound
a melancholy at the disaster which had thus overtaken him, that he threw
himself into the Seine. Fortunately he was rescued, and the shock did
not stay his return to mental soundness. One incident of this painful
episode is worth mentioning. Lamennais, then in the height of his
Catholic exaltation, persuaded Comte's mother to insist on her son being
married with the religious ceremony, and as the younger Madame Comte
apparently did not resist, the rite was duly performed, in spite of the
fact that Comte was at the time raving mad. Philosophic assailants of
Comtism have not always resisted the temptation to recall the
circumstance that its founder was once out of his mind. As has been
justly said, if Newton once suffered a cerebral attack without
forfeiting our veneration for the _Principia_, Comte may have suffered
in the same way, and still not have forfeited our respect for Positive
Philosophy and Positive Polity.

Official work.

In 1828 the lectures were renewed, and in 1830 was published the first
volume of the _Course of Positive Philosophy_. The sketch and ground
plan of this great undertaking had appeared in 1826. The sixth and last
volume was published in 1842. The twelve years covering the publication
of the first of Comte's two elaborate works were years of indefatigable
toil, and they were the only portion of his life in which he enjoyed a
certain measure, and that a very modest measure, of material prosperity.
In 1833 he was appointed examiner of the boys who in the various
provincial schools aspired to enter the Ecole Polytechnique at Paris.
This and two other engagements as a teacher of mathematics secured him
an income of some L400 a year. He made M. Guizot, then Louis Philippe's
minister, the important proposal to establish a chair of general history
of the sciences. If there are four chairs, he argued, devoted to the
history of philosophy, that is to say, the minute study of all sorts of
dreams and aberrations through the ages, surely there ought to be at
least one to explain the formation and progress of our real knowledge?
This wise suggestion, still unfulfilled, was at first welcomed,
according to Comte's own account, by Guizot's philosophic instinct, and
then repulsed by his "metaphysical rancour."

Meanwhile Comte did his official work conscientiously, sorely as he
grudged