exclusively from his own sources, he is apt to lose all measure or
standard by which to be apprized when he is departing from common sense.
Living only with his own thoughts, he gradually forgets the aspect they
present to minds of a different mould from his own; he looks at his
conclusions only from the point of view which suggested them, and from
which they naturally appear perfect; and every consideration which from
other points of view might present itself, either as an objection or as
a necessary modification, is to him as if it did not exist. When his
merits come to be recognised and appreciated, and especially if he
obtains disciples, the intellectual infirmity soon becomes complicated
with a moral one. The natural result of the position is a gigantic
self-confidence, not to say self-conceit. That of M. Comte is colossal.
Except here and there in an entirely self-taught thinker, who has no
high standard with which to compare himself, we have met with nothing
approaching to it. As his thoughts grew more extravagant, his
self-confidence grew more outrageous. The height it ultimately attained
must be seen, in his writings, to be believed.

The other circumstance of a personal nature which it is impossible not
to notice, because M. Comte is perpetually referring to it as the origin
of the great superiority which he ascribes to his later as compared with
his earlier speculations, is the "moral regeneration" which he underwent
from "une angélique influence" and "une incomparable passion privée." He
formed a passionate attachment to a lady whom he describes as uniting
everything which is morally with much that is intellectually admirable,
and his relation to whom, besides the direct influence of her character
upon his own, gave him an insight into the true sources of human
happiness, which changed his whole conception of life. This attachment,
which always remained pure, gave him but one year of passionate
enjoyment, the lady having been cut off by death at the end of that