fulfilled his design. I have dared to undertake the same thing, though I am not yet twenty." He made a fair start by becoming secretary to the great Utopian, Saint-Simon, who passed on to him the reforming enthusiasm of Turgot and Condorcet, and the idea that social, like physical phenomena, might be reduced to laws and science, and that all philosophy should be focused upon the moral and political improvement of mankind. But, like most of us who set out to reform the world, Comte found it difficult enough to manage his own home; in 1827, after two years of marital infelicity, he suffered a mental break-down, and attempted suicide in the Seine. To his rescuer, therefore, we owe something of the five volumes of Positive Philosophy which appeared between 1830 and 1842, and the four volumes of Positive Polity which appeared between 1851 and 1854.
This was an undertaking which, in scope and patience, was second in modern times only to Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy." Here the sciences were classified according to the decreasing simplicity and generality of their subject-matter: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology; each rested on the results of all the sciences before it; therefore sociology was the apex of the sciences, and the others had their reason for existence only in so far as they could provide illumination for the science of society. Science, in the sense of exact knowledge, had spread from one subject-matter to another in the order given; and it was natural that the complex phenomena of social life should be the last to yield to scientific method. In each field of thought the historian of ideas could observe a Law of Three Stages: at first the subject was conceived in the theological fashion, and all problems were explained by the will of some deity-as when the stars were gods, or the chariots of gods; later, the same subject reached the metaphysical stage, and was explained by metaphysical abstractions as when the stars moved in circles because circles were the most perfect figure; finally the subject was reduced to positive science by precise observation, hy-
