Part 27

Rome had a similar group in the time of Augustus; then the world went to sleep, and although there were individuals, now and then, of great talent, their lights went out in darkness, for it takes bulk to make a conflagration.

Florence had her group of thinkers and doers when Michelangelo and Leonardo lived only a few miles apart, but never met. Yet each man spurred the other on to do and dare, until an impetus was reached that sent the names of both down the centuries.

Boswell gives us a group of a dozen men who made each other possible--often helped by hate and strengthened by scorn.

The Mutual Admiration Society does not live in piping times of peace, where glowing good-will strews violets; often the sessions of this interesting aggregation are stormy and acrimonious, but one thing holds--the man who arises at this board must have something to say. Strong men, matched by destiny, set each other a pace. Criticism is full and free. The most interesting and the most successful social experiment in America owed its lease of life largely to its scheme of Public Criticism, a plan society at large will adopt when it puts off swaddling-clothes. Public Criticism is a diversion of gossip into a scientific channel. It is a plan of healthful, hygienic, social plumbing.

England produced one group of thinkers that changed the complexion of the theological belief of Christendom--Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Huxley and Mill. But this group built on the French philosophers, who were taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant, Michelangelo--by absent treatment.

Victor Hugo says that when the skulls of Voltaire and Rousseau were taken in a sack from the Pantheon and tumbled into a common grave, a spark of recognition was emitted that the gravedigger did not see.

Voltaire was patronized by Frederick the Great, who, though a married man, lived a bachelor life and forbade women his court, and protected Kant with the bulging forehead and independent ways. Kant lived among a group of thinkers he never saw, but reached out and touched finger-tips with them over the miles that his feet never traversed.

To Kant are we indebted for Turgot, that practical and farseeing man of affairs told of in matchless phrase in Thomas Watson's "Story of France," the best book ever written in America, with possibly a few exceptions. Condorcet kept step with him, and Auguste Comte calls Condorcet his spiritual stepfather, and a wit of the time here said, "Then Turgot is your uncle"; and Comte replied, "I am proud of the honor, for if Turgot is my uncle, then indeed am I of royal blood."

Auguste Comte is the one bright particular star amid that milky way of riotous thinkers which followed close upon the destruction of the French Monarchy.

When Napoleon visited the grave of Rousseau, he mused in silence and then said, "Perhaps it might have been as well if this man had never lived."

And Marshal Ney, standing near, said, "It reveals small gratitude for Napoleon Bonaparte to say so." Napoleon smiled and answered, "Possibly the world would be as well off if neither of us had ever lived."

Auguste Comte thought that Napoleon was just as necessary in the social evolution as Rousseau, and that both were needed--and he himself was needed to make the matter plain in print.

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Auguste Comte was born at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time to think--if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental impediment.

The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution, save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who are great financiers.

When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development.

At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things, there was no hope for the race.

The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to call his convictions.

He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex.

At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with the local cure; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and contradicted the preacher.

His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French "Polytechnique" was purely a government institution--a sample of the Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth.

But institutions are never much beyond the people--they can not be, for the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not embody public opinion can never be enforced. No man who expresses himself is really much ahead of his time--if he is, the times snuff him out, and quickly.

In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, the Polytechnic School was well saturated with the priestly idea of education, and the attempt was made to produce an alumni of cultured men, rather than a race of useful ones.

Revolt was rife in the ranks of the students. It is still debatable whether revolution and riot in colleges are actuated by a passion for truth or a love of excitement. Anyway, the "Techs" laid deep places to the effect that when a certain professor appeared at chapel, a unique reception would be in store for him.

He appeared, and a fusillade of books, rulers and ink-wells shot at his learned head from every quarter of the room. Other professors appeared and sought to restore order. Riot followed--seats were torn up, windows broken, and there was much loud talk and gesticulation peculiarly Gallic.

It was Ninety-three done in little.

Instead of expelling the delinquents, the National Assembly took the matter in hand and simply voted to close the school.

Auguste Comte went home a hero, proud as a Heidelberg student, with a sweeping scar on his chin and the end of his nose gone. "I have dealt the Old Education its deathblow," he solemnly said, mistaking a cane-rush for a revolution.