the age, to take what is termed the Positivist view of things into
serious consideration, and define their own position, more or less
friendly or hostile, in regard to it. Indeed, though the mode of thought
expressed by the terms Positive and Positivism is widely spread, the
words themselves are, as usual, better known through the enemies of that
mode of thinking than through its friends; and more than one thinker who
never called himself or his opinions by those appellations, and
carefully guarded himself against being confounded with those who did,
finds himself, sometimes to his displeasure, though generally by a
tolerably correct instinct, classed with Positivists, and assailed as a
Positivist. This change in the bearings of philosophic opinion commenced
in England earlier than in France, where a philosophy of a contrary kind
had been more widely cultivated, and had taken a firmer hold on the
speculative minds of a generation formed by Royer-Collard, Cousin,
Jouffroy, and their compeers. The great treatise of M. Comte was
scarcely mentioned in French literature or criticism, when it was
already working powerfully on the minds of many British students and
thinkers. But, agreeably to the usual course of things in France, the
new tendency, when it set in, set in more strongly. Those who call
themselves Positivists are indeed not numerous; but all French writers
who adhere to the common philosophy, now feel it necessary to begin by
fortifying their position against "the Positivist school." And the mode
of thinking thus designated is already manifesting its importance by one
of the most unequivocal signs, the appearance of thinkers who attempt a
compromise or _juste milieu_ between it and its opposite. The acute
critic and metaphysician M. Taine, and the distinguished chemist M.
Berthelot, are the authors of the two most conspicuous of these
attempts.

The time, therefore, seems to have come, when every philosophic thinker