ions; he is the worthiest of
philosophers. Even after the association had come to an end, and at
the very moment when Comte was congratulating himself on having thrown
off the yoke, he honestly admits that Saint Simon's influence has been
of powerful service in his philosophic education. 'I certainly,' he
writes to his most intimate friend, 'am under great personal
obligations to Saint Simon; that is to say, he helped in a powerful
degree to launch me in the philosophical direction that I have now
definitely marked out for myself, and that I shall follow without
looking back for the rest of my life.' Even if there were no such
unmistakable expressions as these, the most cursory glance into Saint
Simon's writings is enough to reveal the thread of connection between
the ingenious visionary and systematic thinker. We see the debt, and
we also see that when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing
has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful
original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint
Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence. As high a degree
of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as
Moliere and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art. In
philosophy the conditions are not different. _Il faut prendre son
bien ou on le trouve._

It is no detriment to Comte's fame that some of the ideas which he
recombined and incorporated in a great philosophic structure had their
origin in ideas that were produced almost at random in the incessant
fermentation of Saint Simon's brain. Comte is in no true sense a
follower of Saint Simon, but it was undoubtedly Saint Simon who
launched him, to take Comte's own word, by suggesting to his strong
and penetrating mind the two starting-points of what grew into the
Comtist system--first, that political phenomena are as capable of
being grouped under laws as other phenomena; and second, that the true
destination of philosophy must be social, and the true object of the
thinker must be the reorganisation of the moral, religious, and
political systems. We can readily see what an impulse these
far-reaching conceptions would give to Comte's meditations. There were
conceptions of less importance than these, in which it is impossible
not to feel that it was Saint Simon's wrong or imperfect idea that put
his young admirer on the track to a right and perfected idea. The
subject is not worthy of further discussion.