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So thus rounded out the life of Auguste Comte beginning in childhood, he traversed the circle, and ended where he began. He died in his sixtieth year. M. Littre, his most famous pupil, touchingly looked after his wants to the last, ministered to his necessities, advancing money on royalties that were never due.
Positivism has been developed in an independent spirit by J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. E. Caro, M. Littré et le Positivisme, 1883, and Herm. The following brief remarks on the course of French philosophy may also be added. Cousin will neither deny metaphysics with the Scotch, nor construe metaphysics a priori with the Germans, but with Descartes bases it on psychology.
Among some foreign books, for instance, which he had ordered for a customer he came upon a copy of some scientific essays by Littre. Among them was a survey of the state of astronomical knowledge written somewhere about 1835, with all the luminous charm which the great Positivist had at command.
And we all know how rich the world is in prey of this kind! Littre. The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. chap. xx. His hand is infallible like his glance. The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.
The scientific study of the phenomena, as Littré complained, 'had hardly been sketched' forty years ago. In the intervening years, psychologists and hypnotists have devoted much attention to the theme of these 'secondary personalities, which Animism explains by the theory of possession.
The articles of Dollfus, Renan, Littre, Montegut, Taillandier, by recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my university life. I was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb and to set off, stick in hand, for any country that might offer stripped and poor, but still young, enthusiastic, and alive, full of ardor and of faith.
Listen to this for directness and honesty of speech taken from the work on the joints characterized by Littre as "the great surgical monument of antiquity": "I have written this down deliberately, believing it is valuable to learn of unsuccessful experiments, and to know the causes of their non-success."
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