es, will never seek their resource from the
confiscation of the estates of the church and poor. Sacrilege and
proscription are not among the ways and means of our committee of
supply. There is not one public man in this kingdom, of any party or
description, who does not reprobate the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel
confiscation which the national assembly have been compelled to make of
that property which it was their first duty to protect.

But to what end should we discuss all these things? How shall we discuss
the limitations of royal power? Your king is in prison. Why speculate on
the measure and standard of liberty? I doubt very much indeed whether
France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard. Society cannot exist
unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere,
and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It
is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of
intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

AUGUSTE COMTE

A Course of Positive Philosophy

Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Xavier Comte, the founder of the
Positive philosophy, was born at Montpellier, in France, Jan. 19,
1798. Entering the Ecole Polytechnique at Paris in his seventeenth
year, he showed mathematical talent, but was expelled for
insubordination. In 1818 he met St. Simon, and for six years he
remained under the influence of that philosopher; but in 1824 he
broke away and entered on an independent philosophical career. In
1826 he expounded to a distinguished audience his system of
Positive philosophy, but during the course had an attack of
insanity which lasted for a few months. Between 1830 and 1842 he
published his "Cours de Philosophie Positive." From 1835 to 1845 he
acted as examiner at the Ecole Polytechnique, but after 1845 he was
supported by a "subsidy" from his admirers. Comte married in 1825,
but his marriage was not happy, and ended in a separation in 1842.
He died on September 5, 1857. His other important works are "The
System of Positive Politics" and the "Positivist Catechism."

_I.--Positive Classification of the Sciences_

On studying the development of human intelligence, it is found that it
passes through three stages: (1) The theological, (2) the metaphysical,
(3) the scientific or positive. In the theological stage it seeks to
account for the worl