AUGUSTE COMTE, the celebrated founder of the Positivist Philosophy, was born at Montpellier, France, January 19th, 1798. In 1814 he was sent to the École Polytechnique at Paris, from which he returned after two years, “having broken up the school as one of the ringleaders in a mutiny.” Soon after this, he adopted Benjamin Franklin for his model. “I seek to imitate that modern Socrates,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “You know that at five and twenty he formed the design of becoming perfectly wise and that he fulfilled his design. I have dared to undertake the same thing, though I am not yet twenty.” Going to Paris in pursuance of his plans, he became a tutor in the family of Casimir Perier, but held the place only a short time. In 1818 he came under the influence of St. Simon, who, he says, “helped in a powerful degree” to give him his direction. In 1825 he married so unhappily that his only recourse was “to concentrate existence on intellectual work.” In 1826 he began a course of lectures which attracted great attention, but were interrupted by his temporary insanity, due to overstudy and domestic trouble. Recovering, he resumed his lectures in 1828, and in 1830 began the publication of the “Course of Positive Philosophy.” Six volumes of this celebrated work appeared, the last in 1842. In 1832, he was appointed one of the examiners of the École Polytechnique, but lost the place because of the offense given by the preface to the sixth volume of his “Philosophy.” In the straits to which this loss reduced him, he was helped by John Stuart Mill, and later (1848) by a public subscription which gave him enough to live upon until his death, September 5th, 1857. According to his biographer, Mr. John Morley, he was “of the type of Brutus or Cato,—a model of austere fixity of purpose, but ungracious, domineering, and not quite free from petty bitterness.” This may account for such incidents as his separation from his wife, or it may perhaps be a deduction from them. His principal works are “Positive Philosophy,” “Positive Catechism,” and “Positive Polity,”—all supporting and developing his worship of “Humanity” and his tenet that “Society can only be regenerated by the greater subordination of politics to morals; by the moralization of capital; by the renovation of the family,”—ends to be reached “by the development of the sympathetic interest.”