otherwise than respectfully of Dr Robinet and the other earnest men, who
maintain round the tomb of their master an organized co-operation for
the diffusion of doctrines which they believe destined to regenerate the
human race. Their enthusiastic veneration for him, and devotion to the
ends he pursued, do honour alike to them and to their teacher, and are
an evidence of the personal ascendancy he exercised over those who
approached him; an ascendancy which for a time carried away even M.
Littré, as he confesses, to a length which his calmer judgment does not
now approve.

These various writings raise many points of interest regarding M.
Comte's personal history, and some, not without philosophic bearings,
respecting his mental habits: from all which matters we shall abstain,
with the exception of two, which he himself proclaimed with great
emphasis, and a knowledge of which is almost indispensable to an
apprehension of the characteristic difference between his second career
and his first. It should be known that during his later life, and even
before completing his first great treatise, M. Comte adopted a rule, to
which he very rarely made any exception: to abstain systematically, not
only from newspapers or periodical publications, even scientific, but
from all reading whatever, except a few favourite poets in the ancient
and modern European languages. This abstinence he practised for the sake
of mental health; by way, as he said, of "_hygiène cérébrale_." We are
far from thinking that the practice has nothing whatever to recommend
it. For most thinkers, doubtless, it would be a very unwise one; but we
will not affirm that it may not sometimes be advantageous to a mind of
the peculiar quality of M. Comte's--one that can usefully devote itself
to following out to the remotest developments a particular line of
meditations, of so arduous a kind that the complete concentration of the
intellect upon its own thoughts is almost a necessary condition of