omte tried to find pupils to board with him, but only one
pupil came, and he was soon sent away for lack of companions. 'I would
rather spend an evening,' wrote the needy enthusiast, 'in solving a
difficult question, than in running after some empty-headed and
consequential millionaire in search of a pupil.' A little money was
earned by an occasional article in _Le Producteur_, in which he began
to expound the philosophic ideas that were now maturing in his mind.
He announced a course of lectures (1826), which it was hoped would
bring money as well as fame, and which were to be the first dogmatic
exposition of the Positive Philosophy. A friend had said to him, 'You
talk too freely, your ideas are getting abroad, and other people use
them without giving you the credit; put your ownership on record.' The
lectures were intended to do this among other things, and they
attracted hearers so eminent as Humboldt the cosmologist, as Poinsot
the geometer, as Blainville the physiologist.

Unhappily, after the third lecture of the course, Comte had a severe
attack of cerebral derangement, brought on by intense and prolonged
meditation, acting on a system that was already irritated by the
chagrin of domestic failure. 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 the unfortunate man was at the
time neither more nor less than raving mad. To such shocking
conspiracies against common sense and decency does ecclesiastical
zealotry bring even good men like Lamennais. On the other hand,
philosophic assailants of Comtism have not always resisted the
temptation to recall the circumstance that its founder was once out of
his mind,--an unworthy and irrelevant device, that cannot be excused
even by the provocation of Comte's own occasional acerbity. As has
been justly said, if Newton once suffered a cerebral attack without on
that account forfeiting our veneration for the _Principi