of his doctrine, as well as the direct and
immediate pretensions of himself and his system. The third course
ended in the following uncompromising terms--'In the name of the Past
and of the Future, the servants of Humanity--both its philosophical
and its practical servants--come forward to claim as their due the
general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at
length a real Providence in all departments,--moral, intellectual, and
material. Consequently they exclude once for all from political
supremacy all the different servants of God--Catholic, Protestant, or
Deist--as being at once behindhand and a cause of disturbance.' A few
weeks after this invitation a very different person stepped forward to
constitute himself a real Providence.

In 1852 Comte published the _Catechism of Positivism_. In the preface
to it he took occasion to express his approval of Louis Napoleon's
_coup d'etat_ of the 2d of December,--'a fortunate crisis which has
set aside the parliamentary system, and instituted a dictatorial
republic.' Whatever we may think of the political sagacity of such a
judgment, it is due to Comte to say that he did not expect to see his
dictatorial republic transformed into a dynastic empire, and, next,
that he did expect from the Man of December freedom of the press and
of public meeting. His later hero was the Emperor Nicholas, 'the only
statesman in Christendom,'--as unlucky a judgment as that which placed
Dr. Francia in the Comtist Calendar.

In 1857 he was attacked by cancer, and died peaceably on the 5th of
September of that year. The anniversary is always celebrated by
ceremonial gatherings of his French and English followers, who then
commemorate the name and the services of the founder of their
religion. Comte was under sixty when he died. We cannot help
reflecting that one of the worst of all the evils connected with the
shortness of human life is the impatience that it breeds in some of
the most ardent and enlightened minds to hurry on the execution of
projects, for which neither the time nor the spirit of their author is
fully ripe.

In proceeding to give an outline of Comte's system, we shall consider
the _Positive Polity_ as the more or less legitimate sequel of the
_Positive Philosophy_, notwithstanding the deep gulf which so eminent
a critic as Mr. Mill insisted upon fixing between the earlier and the
later work.[2] There may be, as we think there is, the greatest
difference in the