and are supported by an endowment from the State, voted periodically,
but administered by themselves. Like women, they are to be excluded from
all riches, and from all participation in power (except the absolute
power of each over his own household). They are neither to inherit, nor
to receive emolument from any of their functions, or from their writings
or teachings of any description, but are to live solely on their small
salaries. This M. Comte deems necessary to the complete
disinterestedness of their counsel. To have the confidence of the
masses, they must, like the masses, be poor. Their exclusion from
political and from all other practical occupations is indispensable for
the same reason, and for others equally peremptory. Those occupations
are, he contends, incompatible with the habits of mind necessary to
philosophers. A practical position, either private or public, chains the
mind to specialities and details, while a philosopher's business is with
general truths and connected views (vues d'ensemble). These, again,
require an habitual abstraction from details, which unfits the mind for
judging well and rapidly of individual cases. The same person cannot be
both a good theorist and a good practitioner or ruler, though
practitioners and rulers ought to have a solid theoretic education. The
two kinds of function must be absolutely exclusive of one another: to
attempt them both, is inconsistent with fitness for either. But as men
may mistake their vocation, up to the age of thirty-five they are
allowed to change their career.

To the clergy is entrusted the theoretic or scientific instruction of
youth. The medical art also is to be in their hands, since no one is fit
to be a physician who does not study and understand the whole man, moral
as well as physical. M. Comte has a contemptuous opinion of the existing
race of physicians, who, he says, deserve no higher name than that of
veterinaires, since they concern themselves with man only in his animal,