s approval, published an
appeal for subscriptions, and on the money thus contributed Comte
subsisted for the remaining nine years of his life. By 1852 the subsidy
produced as much as L200 a year. It is worth noticing that Mill was one
of the subscribers, and that Littre continued his assistance after he
had been driven from Comte's society by his high pontifical airs. We are
sorry not to be able to record any similar trait of magnanimity on
Comte's part. His character, admirable as it is for firmness, for
intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the
service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that
make us love good men and pity bad ones.

Literary method.

It is best to think of him only as the intellectual worker, pursuing in
uncomforted obscurity the laborious and absorbing task to which he had
given up his whole life. His singularly conscientious fashion of
elaborating his ideas made the mental strain more intense than even so
exhausting a work as the abstract exposition of the principles of
positive science need have been. He did not write down a word until he
had first composed the whole matter in his mind. When he had thoroughly
meditated every sentence, he sat down to write, and then, such was the
grip of his memory, the exact order of his thoughts came back to him as
if without an effort, and he wrote down precisely what he had intended
to write, without the aid of a note or a memorandum, and without check
or pause. For example, he began and completed in about six weeks a
chapter in the _Positive Philosophy_ (vol. v. ch. 55) which would fill
forty pages of this Encyclopaedia. When we reflect that the chapter is
not narrative, but an abstract exposition of the guiding principles of
the movements of several centuries, with many threads of complex thought
running along side by side all through the speculation, then the
circumstances under which it was reduced to literary form are really
astonishing. It is hardly possible, however, to share the admiration
expressed by some of Comte's disciples for his style. We are not so
unreasonable as to blame him for failing to make his pages picturesque
or thrilling; we do not want sunsets and stars and roses and ecstasy;
but there is a certain standard for the most serious and abstract
subjects. When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's,
Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Comte's manner is heavy, laboured,
monotonous,