Comte, AUGUSTE

Comte, AUGUSTE, the founder of Positivism (q.v.), was born 19th January 1798, at Montpellier, where his father was treasurer of taxes. At the Lycée of his native place he was distinguished equally for his aptitude for mathematics and his resistance to official authority, characteristics which did not desert him on his entering the École Polytechnique at Paris in his seventeenth year. Here he took the lead in a protest of the students against the manners of one of the tutors, and was expelled, after a residence of two years had obtained recognition of his abilities from the professors. A few months were spent with his parents, and then Comte returned to Paris, where for a time he made a scanty living by teaching mathematics. It would seem that, some years before, he had completely freed himself from the influence of all existing social and religious theories, and a reforming zeal was beginning to possess his mind, when in 1818 he came into contact with St Simon, by whom his inclination towards the reconstruction of thought and life was confirmed and strengthened. A definite relation was established between them, by which Comte remained for six years the disciple and collaborator of the older thinker; but there gradually became apparent a disagreement of aim and method, and the necessity felt by Comte of asserting the independence of his own conceptions led to a violent rupture. In 1825 Comte married, but the union proved unhappy, and after seventeen years of intermittent discord, ended in a separation. In the following year Comte began a course of lectures in exposition of his system of philosophy, which was attended by several eminent men of science, but the course was soon interrupted by an attack of insanity, which disabled the lecturer for a few months. His labours were afterwards resumed, and the six volumes of his Philosophie Positive was published at intervals between 1830 and 1842, during which period his livelihood was chiefly obtained from the offices of examiner and tutor in the École Polytechnique. After these positions were taken from him, owing to the prejudices of his colleagues, he resumed the private teaching of mathematics, but in his later years he was supported entirely by a 'subsidy' from his friends and admirers. In 1845 Comte became acquainted with Clothilde de Vaux, and until her death within a year afterwards, a close intimacy was maintained between them. On Comte's side it was a passionate attachment, the purity of which was happily preserved, and its influence is clearly shown in his later works, especially in the most important of these, the Politique Positive. Comte died in his sixtieth year on 5th September 1857. He was buried in the cemetery of Père-la-Chaise. A full account of his system will be found in the article POSITIVISM. His works are Cours de Philosophie Positive (6 vols. Paris, 1830-42; freely translated into English, and condensed by Harriet Martineau, 2 vols. 1853), Traité Élémentaire de Géométrie Analytique (1843), Traité d'Astronomie Populaire (1845), Discours sur l'Ensemble du Positivism (1848), Système de Politique Positive (4 vols. 1851-54; Eng. trans. 1875 et seq., Longmans), and Catéchisme Positiviste, ou Sommaire Exposition de la Religion Universelle (1 vol. Paris, 1852). Comte's Testament was published with a good many of his letters in 1884.