d feeling, and it would have been better for
Comte's later work if she had survived to exert a wholesome restraint on
his exaltation. Their friendship had only lasted a year when she died
(1846), but the period was long enough to give her memory a supreme
ascendancy in Comte's mind. Condillac, Joubert, Mill and other eminent
men have shown what the intellectual ascendancy of a woman can be. Comte
was as inconsolable after Madame de Vaux's death as D'Alembert after the
death of Mademoiselle L'Espinasse. Every Wednesday afternoon he made a
reverential pilgrimage to her tomb, and three times every day he invoked
her memory in words of passionate expansion. His disciples believe that
in time the world will reverence Comte's sentiment about Clotilde de
Vaux, as it reveres Dante's adoration of Beatrice--a parallel that Comte
himself was the first to hit upon. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is
a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed
to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching
and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic
poet. Whatever other gifts Comte may have had--and he had many of the
rarest kind,--poetic imagination was not among them, any more than
poetic or emotional expression was among them. His was one of those
natures whose faculty of deep feeling is unhappily doomed to be
inarticulate, and to pass away without the magic power of transmitting
itself.

Positive Polity.

Comte lost no time, after the completion of his _Course of Positive
Philosophy_, in proceeding with the _System of Positive Polity_, for
which the earlier work was designed to be a foundation. The first volume
was published in 1851, and the fourth and last in 1854. In 1848, when
the political air was charged with stimulating elements, he founded the
Positive Society, with the expectation that it might grow into a reunion
as powerful over the new revolution as the Jacobin Club had been in the
revolution of 1789. The hope was not fulfilled, but a certain number of
philosophic disciples gathered round Comte, and eventually formed
themselves, under the guidance of the new ideas of the latter half of
his life, into a kind of church, for whose use was drawn up the
_Positivist Calendar_ (1849), in which the names of those who had
advanced civilization replaced the titles of the saints. Gutenberg and
Shakespeare were among the patrons of the thirteen months in this
cale