Livre i

. pt. ii. ch. cxx.):--"Por ce nagent li marinier à l'enseigne des estoiles qui i sont, que il apelent tramontaines, et les gens qui sont en Europe et es parties decà nagent à la tramontaine de septentrion, et li autre nagent à cele de midi. Et qui n'en set la verité, praigne une pierre d'aimant, et troverez que ele a ij faces: l'une qui gist vers l'une tramontaine, et l'autre gist vers l'autre. Et à chascune des ij faces la pointe d'une aguille vers cele tramontaine à cui cele face gist. Et por ce seroient li marinier deceu se il ne se preissent garde" (p. 147, Paris edition, 1863). Dante (_Paradiso_, xii. 28-30) mentions the pointing of the magnetic needle toward the pole star. In Scandinavian records there is a reference to the nautical use of the magnet in the _Hauksbók_, the last edition of the _Landnámabók_ (Book of the Colonization of Iceland):--"Floki, son of Vilgerd, instituted a great sacrifice, and consecrated three ravens which should show him the way (to Iceland); for at that time no men sailing the high seas had lodestones up in northern lands."

Haukr Erlendsson, who wrote this paragraph about 1300, died in 1334; his edition was founded on material in two earlier works, that of Styrmir Karason (who died 1245), which is lost, and that of Hurla Thordson (died 1284) which has no such paragraph. All that is certain is a knowledge of the nautical use of the magnet at the end of the 13th century. From T. Torfaeus we learn that the compass, fitted into a box, was already in use among the Norwegians about the middle of the 13th century (_Hist. rer. Norvegicarum_, iv. c. 4, p. 345, Hafniae, 1711); and it is probable that the use of the magnet at sea was known in Scotland at or shortly subsequent to that time, though King Robert, in crossing from Arran to Carrick in 1306, as Barbour writing in 1375 informs us, "na nedill had na stane," but steered by a fire on the shore. Roger Bacon (_Opus majus_ and _Opus minus_, 1266-1267) was acquainted with the properties of the lodestone, and wrote that if set so that it can turn freely (swimming on water) it points toward the poles; but he stated that this was not due to the pole-star, but to the influence of the northern region of the heavens.

The earliest unquestionable description of a pivoted compass is that contained in the remarkable _Epistola de magnete_ of Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt, written at Lucera in 1269 to Sigerus de Foncaucourt. (First printed edition Augsburg, 1558. See also Bertelli in Boncompagni's _Bollettino di bibliografia_, t. i., or S. P. Thompson in _Proc. British Academy_, vol. ii.) Of this work twenty-eight MSS. exist; seven of them being at Oxford. The first part of the epistle deals generally with magnetic attractions and repulsions, with the polarity of the stone, and with the supposed influence of the poles of the heavens upon the poles of the stone. In the second part Peregrinus describes first an improved floating compass with fiducial line, a circle graduated with 90 degrees to each quadrant, and provided with movable sights for taking bearings. He then describes a new compass with a needle thrust through a pivoted axis, placed in a box with transparent cover, cross index of brass or silver, divided circle, and an external "rule" or alhidade provided with a pair of sights. In the Leiden MS. of this work, which for long was erroneously ascribed to one Peter Adsiger, is a spurious passage, long believed to mention the variation of the compass.

Prior to this clear description of a pivoted compass by Peregrinus in 1269, the Italian sailors had used the floating magnet, probably introduced into this region of the Mediterranean by traders belonging to the port of Amalfi, as commemorated in the line of the poet Panormita:--

"Prima dedit nautis usum magnetis Amalphis."

This opinion is supported by the historian Flavius Blondus in his _Italia illustrata_, written about 1450, who adds that its certain origin is unknown. In 1511 Baptista Pio in his _Commentary_ repeats the opinion as to the invention of the use of the magnet at Amalfi as related by Flavius. Gyraldus, writing in 1540 (_Libellus de re nautica_), misunderstanding this reference, declared that this observation of the direction of the magnet to the poles had been handed down as discovered "by a certain Flavius." From this passage arose a legend, which took shape only in the 17th century, that the compass was invented in the year 1302 by a person to whom was given the fictitious name of Flavio Gioja, of Amalfi.

From the above it will have been evident that, as Barlowe remarks concerning the compass, "the lame tale of one Flavius at Amelphus, in the kingdome of Naples, for to have devised it, is of very slender probabilitie"; and as regards the assertion of Dr Gilbert, of Colchester (_De magnete_, p. 4, 1600), that Marco Polo introduced the compass into Italy from the East in 1260,[4] we need only quote the words of Sir H. Yule (_Book of Marco Polo_):--"Respecting the mariner's compass and gunpowder, I shall say nothing, as no one now, I believe, imagines Marco to have had anything to do with their introduction."

When, and by whom, the compass card was added is a matter of conjecture. Certainly the _Rosa Ventorum_, or _Wind-rose_, is far older than the compass itself; and the naming of the eight principal "winds" goes back to the Temple of the Winds in Athens built by Andronicus Cyrrhestes. The earliest known wind-roses on the _portulani_ or sailing charts of the Mediterranean pilots have almost invariably the eight principal points marked with the initials of the principal winds, Tramontano, Greco, Levante, Scirocco, Ostro, Africo (or Libeccio), Ponente and Maestro, or with a cross instead of L, to mark the east point. The north point, indicated in some of the oldest compass cards with a broad arrow-head or a spear, as well as with a T for Tramontano, gradually developed by a combination of these, about 1492, into a _fleur de lis_, still universal. The cross at the east continued even in British compasses till about 1700. Wind-roses with these characteristics are found in Venetian and Genoese charts of early 14th century, and are depicted similarly by the Spanish navigators. The naming of the intermediate subdivisions making up the thirty-two points or rhumbs of the compass card is probably due to Flemish navigators; but they were recognized even in the time of Chaucer, who in 1391 wrote, "Now is thin Orisonte departed in xxiiii partiez by thi azymutz, in significacion of xxiiii

## partiez of the world: al be it so that ship men rikne thilke partiez in

xxxii" (_Treatise on the Astrolabe_, ed. Skeat, Early English Text Soc., London, 1872). The mounting of the card upon the needle or "flie," so as to turn with it, is probably of Amalphian origin. Da Buti, the Dante commentator, in 1380 says the sailors use a compass at the middle of which is pivoted a wheel of light paper to turn on its pivot, on which wheel the needle is fixed and the star (wind-rose) painted. The placing of the card at the bottom of the box, fixed, below the needle, was practised by the compass-makers of Nuremberg in the 16th century, and by Stevinus of Bruges about 1600. The gimbals or rings for suspension hinged at right-angles to one another, have been erroneously attributed to Cardan, the proper term being _cardine_, that is hinged or pivoted. The earliest description of them is about 1604. The term _binnacle_, originally _bittacle_, is a corruption of the Portuguese abitacolo, to denote the housing enclosing the compass, probably originating with the Portuguese navigators.

The improvement of the compass has been but a slow process. _The Libel of English Policie_, a poem of the first half of the 15th century, says with reference to Iceland (chap. x.)--

"Out of Bristowe, and costes many one, Men haue practised by nedle and by stone Thider wardes within a litle while."

Hakluyt, _Principal Navigations_, p. 201 (London, 1599).

From this it would seem that the compasses used at that time by English mariners were of a very primitive description. Barlowe, in his treatise _Magnetical Advertisements_, printed in 1616 (p. 66), complains that "the Compasse needle, being the most admirable and usefull instrument of the whole world, is both amongst ours and other nations for the most part, so bungerly and absurdly contrived, as nothing more." The form he recommends for the needle is that of "a true circle, having his Axis going out beyond the circle, at each end narrow and narrower, unto a reasonable sharpe point, and being pure steele as the circle it selfe is, having in the middest a convenient receptacle to place the capitell in." In 1750 Dr Gowan Knight found that the needles of merchant-ships were made of two pieces of steel bent in the middle and united in the shape of a rhombus, and proposed to substitute straight steel bars of small breadth, suspended edgewise and hardened throughout. He also showed that the Chinese mode of suspending the needle conduces most to sensibility. In 1820 Peter Barlow reported to the Admiralty that half the compasses in the British Navy were mere lumber and ought to be destroyed. He introduced a pattern having four or five parallel straight strips of magnetized steel fixed under a card, a form which remained the standard admiralty type until the introduction of the modern Thomson (Kelvin) compass in 1876. (F. H. B.; S. P. T.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Adamas in India reperitur ... Ferrum occulta quadam natura ad se trahit. Acus ferrea postquam adamantem contigerit, ad stellam septentrionalem ... semper convertitur, unde valde necessarius est navigantibus in mari.

[2] Sicut acus per naturam vertitur ad septentrionem dum sit tacta a magnete.--Sicut acus nautica dirigit marinarios in sua navigatione.

[3] Ginguené, _Hist. lit. de l'Italie_, t. i. p. 413.

[4] "According to all the texts he returned to Venice in 1295 or, as is more probable, in 1296."--Yule.

COMPASS PLANT, a native of the North American prairies, which takes its name from the position assumed by the leaves. These turn their edges to north and south, thus avoiding the excessive mid-day heat, while getting the full benefit of the morning and evening rays. The plant is known botanically as _Silphium laciniatum_, and belongs to the natural order Compositae. Another member of the same order, _Lactuca Scariola_, which has been regarded as the origin of the cultivated lettuce (_L. sativa_), behaves in the same way when growing in dry exposed places; it is a native of Europe and northern Asia which has got introduced into North America.

COMPAYRE, JULES GABRIEL (1843- ), French educationalist, was born at Albi. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1862 and became professor of philosophy. In 1876 he was appointed professor in the Faculty of Letters of Toulouse, and upon the creation of the École normale d'institutrices at Fontenay aux Roses he became teacher of pedagogy (1880). From 1881 to 1889 he was deputy for Lavaur in the chamber, and took an active part in the discussions on public education. Defeated at the elections of 1889, he was appointed rector of the academy of Poitiers in 1890, and five years later to the academy of Lyons. His principal publications are his _Histoire critique des doctrines de l'éducation en France_ (1879); _Éléments d'éducation civique_ (1881), a work placed on the index at Rome, but very widely read in the primary schools of France; _Cours de pédagogie théorique et pratique_ (1885, 13th ed., 1897); _The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child_, in English (2 vols., New York, 1896-1902); and a series of monographs on _Les Grands Éducateurs_.

COMPENSATION (from Lat. _compensare_, to weigh one thing against another), a term applied in English law to a number of different forms of legal reparation; e.g. under the Forfeiture Act 1870 (s. 4), for loss of property caused by felony, or--under the Riot (Damages) Act 1886--to persons whose property has been stolen, destroyed or injured by rioters (see RIOT). It is due, under the Agricultural Holdings Acts 1883-1906, for agricultural improvements (see LANDLORD AND TENANT; cf. also Allotments and Small Holdings), and under the Workmen's Compensation Act 1906 to workmen, in respect of accidents in the course of their employment (see EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY); and under the Licensing Act 1904, to the payments to be made on the extinction of licences to sell intoxicants. The term "Compensation water" is used to describe the water given from a reservoir in compensation for water abstracted from a stream, under statutory powers, in connexion with public works (see WATER SUPPLY). As to the use of the word "compensation" in horology, see CLOCK; WATCH.

Compensation, in its most familiar sense, is however a _nomen juris_ for the reparation or satisfaction made to the owners of property which is taken by the state or by local authorities or by the promoters of parliamentary undertakings, under statutory authority, for public purposes. There are two main legal theories on which such appropriation of private property is justified. The American may be taken as a representative illustration of the one, and the English of the other. Though not included in the definition of "eminent domain," the necessity for compensation is recognized as incidental to that power. (See Eminent Domain, under which the American law of compensation, and the closely allied doctrine of _expropriation pour cause d'utilité_ publique of French law, and the law of other continental countries, are discussed.) The rule of English constitutional law, on the other hand, is that the property of the citizen cannot be seized for purposes which are really "public" without a fair pecuniary equivalent being given to him; and, as the money for such compensation must come from parliament, the practical result is that the seizure can only be effected under legislative authority. An action for illegal interference with the property of the subject is not maintainable against officials of the crown or government sued in their official capacity or as an official body. But crown officials may be sued in their individual capacity for such interference, even if they acted with the authority of the government (cp. _Raleigh_ v. _Goschen_ [1898], 1 Ch. 73).

_Law of England._--Down to 1845 every act authorizing the purchase of lands had, in addition to a number of common form clauses, a variety of special clauses framed with a view to meeting the particular circumstances with which it dealt. In 1845, however, a statute based on the recommendations of a select committee, appointed in the preceding year, was passed; the object being to diminish the bulk of the special acts, and to introduce uniformity into private bill legislation by classifying the common form clauses, embodying them in general statutes, and facilitating their incorporation into the special statutes by reference. The statute by which this change was initiated was the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act 1845; and the policy has been continued by a series of later statutes which, together with the act of 1845, are now grouped under the generic title of the Lands Clauses Acts.

The public purposes for which lands are taken are threefold. Certain public departments, such as the war office and the admiralty, may acquire lands for national purposes (see the Defence Acts 1842 to 1873; and the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act 1860, s. 7). Local authorities are enabled to exercise similar powers for an enormous variety of municipal purposes, e.g. the housing of the working classes, the improvement of towns, and elementary and secondary education. Lastly, the promoters of public undertakings of a commercial character, such as railways and harbours, carry on their operations under statutes in which the provisions of the Lands Clauses Acts are incorporated.

Lands may be taken under the Lands Clauses Acts either by agreement or compulsorily. The first step in the proceedings is a "notice to treat," or intimation by the promoters of their readiness to purchase the land, coupled with a demand for particulars as to the estate and the interests in it. The landowner on whom the notice is served may meet it by agreeing to sell, and the terms may then be settled by consent of the

## parties themselves, or by arbitration, if they decide to have recourse

to that mode of adjusting the difficulty. If the property claimed is a house, or other building or manufactory, the owner has a statutory right to require the promoters by a counternotice to take the whole, even although a part would serve their purpose. This rule, however, is, in modern acts, often modified by special clauses. On receipt of the counter-notice the promoters must either assent to the requirement contained in it, or abandon their notice to treat. On the other hand, if the landowner fails within twenty-one days after receipt of the notice to treat to give the particulars which it requires, the promoters may proceed to exercise their compulsory powers and to obtain assessment of the compensation to be paid. As a general rule, it is a condition precedent to the exercise of these powers by a company that the capital of the undertaking should be fully subscribed. Compensation, under the Lands Clauses Acts, is assessed in four different modes:--(1) by justices, where the claim does not exceed £50, or a claimant who has no greater interest than that of a tenant for a year, or from year to year, is required to give up possession before the expiration of his tenancy; (2) by arbitration (a) when the claim exceeds £50, and the claimant desires arbitration, and the interest is not a yearly tenancy, (b) when the amount has been ascertained by a surveyor, and the claimant is dissatisfied, (c) when superfluous lands are to be sold, and the parties entitled to pre-emption and the promoters cannot agree as to the price. (Lands become "superfluous" if taken compulsorily on an erroneous estimate of the area needed, or if part only was needed and the owner compelled the promoters under the power above mentioned to take the whole, or in cases of abandonment); (3) by a jury, when the claim exceeds £50, and (a) the claimant does not signify his desire for arbitration, or no award has been made within the prescribed time, or (b) the claimant applies in writing for trial by jury; (4) by surveyors, nominated by justices, where the owner is under disability, or does not appear at the appointed time, or the claim is in respect of commonable rights, and a committee has not been appointed to treat with the promoters.

Promoters are not allowed without the consent of the owner to enter upon lands which are the subject of proceedings under the Lands Clauses Acts, except for the purpose of making a survey, unless they have executed a statutory bond and made a deposit, at the Law Courts Branch of the Bank of England, as security for the performance of the conditions of the bond.

_Measure of Value._--(1) Where land is taken, the basis on which compensation is assessed is the commercial value of the land to the owner at the date of the notice to treat. Potential value may be taken into account, and also good-will of the property in a business. This rule, however, excludes any consideration of the principle of "betterment." (2) Where land, although not taken, is "injuriously affected" by the works of the promoters, compensation is payable for loss or damage resulting from any act, legalized by the promoters' statutory powers, which would otherwise have been actionable, or caused by the execution (not the use) of the works authorized by the undertaking.

The following examples of how land may be "injuriously affected," so as to give a right to compensation under the acts, may be given:--narrowing or obstructing a highway which is the nearest access to the lands in question; interference with a right of way; substantial interference with ancient lights; noise of children outside a board school.

_Scotland and Ireland._--The Lands Clauses Act 1845 extends to Ireland. There is a Scots enactment similar in character (Lands Clauses [Scotland] Act 1845). The principles and practice of the law of compensation are substantially the same throughout the United Kingdom.

_India and the British Colonies._--Legislation analogous to the Lands Clauses Acts is in force in India (Land Acquisition Act 1894 [Act I of 1894]) and in most of the colonies (see western Australia, Lands Resumption Act 1894 [58 Vict. No. 33], Victoria, Lands Compensation Act 1890 [54 Vict. No. 1109]; New Zealand, Public Works Act 1894 [58 Vict. No. 42]; Ontario [Revised Stats. 1897, c. 37]).

AUTHORITIES.--_English Law_: Balfour Browne and Allan, _Compensation_ (2nd ed., London, 1903); Cripps, _Compensation_ (5th edition, London, 1905); Hudson, _Compensation_ (London, 1906); Boyle and Waghorn, _Compensation_ (London, 1903); Lloyd, _Compensation_ (6th ed. by Brooks, London, 1895); Clifford, _Private Bill Legislation_, London, 1885 (vol. i.), 1887 (vol. ii.) _Scots Law_: Deas, _Law of Railways in Scotland_ (ed. by Ferguson; Edinburgh, 1897); Rankine, _Law of Landownership_ (3rd ed., 1891). (A. W. R.)

COMPIÈGNE, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Oise, 52 m. N.N.E. of Paris on the Northern railway between Paris and St Quentin. Pop. (1906) 14,052. The town, which is a favourite summer resort, stands on the north-west border of the forest of Compiègne and on the left bank of the Oise, less than 1 m. below its confluence with the Aisne. The river is crossed by a bridge built in the reign of Louis XV. The Rue Solférino, a continuation of the bridge ending at the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, is the busy street of the town; elsewhere, except on market days, the streets are quiet. The hôtel de ville, with a graceful façade surmounted by a lofty belfry, is in the late Gothic style of the early 16th century and was completed in modern times. Of the churches, St Antoine (13th and 16th centuries) with some fine Renaissance stained glass, and St Jacques (13th and 15th centuries), need alone be mentioned. The remains of the ancient abbey of St Corneille are used as a military storehouse. Compiègne, from a very early period until 1870, was the occasional residence of the French kings. Its palace, one of the most magnificent structures of its kind, was erected, chiefly by Louis XV. and Louis XVI., on the site of a château of King Charles V. of France. It now serves as an art museum. It has two façades, one overlooking the Place du Palais and the town, the other, more imposing, facing towards a fine park and the forest, which is chiefly of oak and beech and covers over 36,000 acres. Compiègne is the seat of a subprefect, and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a communal college, library and hospital. The industries comprise boat-building, rope-making, steam-sawing, distilling and the manufacture of chocolate, machinery and sacks and coarse coverings, and at Margny, a suburb, there are manufactures of chemicals and felt hats. Asparagus is cultivated in the environs. There is considerable trade in timber and coal, chiefly river-borne.

Compiègne, or as it is called in the Latin chronicles, Compendium, seems originally to have been a hunting-lodge of the early Frankish kings. It was enriched by Charles the Bald with two castles, and a Benedictine abbey dedicated to Saint Corneille, the monks of which retained down to the 18th century the privilege of acting for three days as lords of Compiègne, with full power to release prisoners, condemn the guilty, and even inflict sentence of death. It was in Compiègne that King Louis I. the Debonair was deposed in 833; and at the siege of the town in 1430 Joan of Arc was taken prisoner by the English. A monument to her faces the hôtel de ville. In 1624 the town gave its name to a treaty of alliance concluded by Richelieu with the Dutch; and it was in the palace that Louis XV. gave welcome to Marie Antoinette, that Napoleon I. received Marie Louise of Austria, that Louis XVIII. entertained the emperor Alexander of Russia, and that Leopold I., king of the Belgians, was married to the princess Louise. In 1814 Compiègne offered a stubborn resistance to the Prussian troops. Under Napoleon III. it was the annual resort of the court during the hunting season. From 1870 to 1871 it was one of the headquarters of the German army.

COMPLEMENT (Lat. _complementum_, from _complere_, to fill up), that which fills up or completes anything, e.g. the number of men necessary to man a ship. In geometry, the complement of an angle is the difference between the angle and a right angle; the complements of a parallelogram are formed by drawing parallel to adjacent sides of a parallelogram two lines intersecting on a diagonal; four parallelograms are thus formed, and the two not about the diagonal of the original parallelogram are the complements of the parallelogram. In analysis, a complementary function is a partial solution to a differential equation (q.v.); complementary operators are reciprocal or inverse operators, i.e. two operations A and B are complementary when both operating on the same figure or function leave it unchanged. A "complementary colour" is one which produces white when mixed with another (see COLOUR). In Spanish the word _cumplimento_ was used in a particular sense of the fulfilment of the duties of polite behaviour and courtesy, and it came through the French and Italian forms into use in English, with a change in spelling to "compliment," with the sense of an act of politeness, especially of a polite expression of praise, or of social regard and greetings. The word "comply," meaning to act in accordance with wishes, orders or conditions, is also derived from the same origin, but in sense is connected with "ply" or "pliant," from Lat. _plicare_, to bend, with the idea of subserviently yielding to the wishes of another.

COMPLUVIUM (from Lat. _compluere_, to flow together, i.e. in reference to the rain being collected and falling through), in architecture, the Latin term for the open space left in the roof of the atrium of a Roman house for lighting it and the rooms round (see CAVAEDIUM).

COMPOSITAE, the name given to the largest natural order of flowering plants, containing about one-tenth of the whole number and characterized by the crowding of the flowers into heads. The order is cosmopolitan, and the plants show considerable variety in habit. The great majority, including most British representatives, are herbaceous, but in the warmer parts of the world shrubs and arborescent forms also occur; the latter are characteristic of the flora of oceanic islands. In herbaceous plants the leaves are often arranged in a rosette on a much shortened stem, as in dandelion, daisy and others; when the stem is elongated the leaves are generally alternate. The root is generally thickened, sometimes, as in dahlia, tuberous; root and stem contain oil passages, or, as in lettuce and dandelion, a milky white latex. The flowers are crowded in heads (_capitula_) which are surrounded by an involucre of green bracts,--these protect the head of flowers in the bud stage, performing the usual function of a calyx. The enlarged top of the axis, the receptacle, is flat, convex or conical, and the flowers open in centripetal succession. In many cases, as in the sunflower or daisy, the outer or ray-florets are larger and more conspicuous than the inner, or disk-florets; in other cases, as in dandelion, the florets are all alike. Ray-florets when present are usually pistillate, but neuter in some genera (as _Centaurea_); the disk-florets are hermaphrodite. The flower is epigynous; the calyx is sometimes absent, or is represented by a rim on the top of the ovary, or takes the form of hairs or bristles which enlarge in the fruiting stage to form the pappus by means of which the seed is dispersed. The corolla, of five united petals, is regular and tubular in shape as in the disk-florets, or irregular when it is either strap-shaped (ligulate), as in the ray-florets of daisy, &c., or all the florets of dandelion, or more rarely two-lipped. The five stamens are attached to the interior of the corolla-tube; the filaments are free; the anthers are joined (syngenesious) to form a tube round the single style, which ends in a pair of stigmas. The inferior ovary contains one ovule (attached to the base of the chamber), and ripens to form a dry one-seeded fruit; the seed is filled with the straight embryo.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.

1. Flower head of Marigold. 3. Head of fruits, nat. size. 2. Same in vertical section. 4. A single fruit.]

The flower-heads are an admirable example of an adaptation for pollination by aid of insects. The crowding of the flowers in heads ensures the pollination of a large number as the result of a single insect visit. Honey is secreted at the base of the style, and is protected from rain or dew and the visits of short-lipped insects by the corolla-tube, the length of which is correlated with the length of proboscis of the visiting insect. When the flower opens, the two stigmas are pressed together below the tube formed by the anthers, the latter split on the inside, and the pollen fills the tube; the style gradually lengthens and carries the pollen out of the anther tube, and finally the stigmas spread and expose their receptive surface which has hitherto been hidden, the two being pressed together. Thus the life history of the flower falls into two stages, an earlier or male and a later or female. This favours cross-pollination as compared with self-pollination. In many cases there is a third stage, as in dandelion, where the stigmas finally curl back so that they touch any pollen grains which have been left on the style, thus ensuring self-pollination if cross-pollination has not been effected.

The devices for distribution of the fruit are very varied. Frequently there is a hairy or silky pappus forming a tuft of hairs, as in thistle or coltsfoot, or a parachute-like structure as in dandelion; these render the fruit sufficiently light to be carried by the wind. In _Bidens_ the pappus consists of two or more stiff-barbed bristles which cause the fruit to cling to the coats of animals. Occasionally, as in sunflower or daisy, the fruits bear no special appendage and remain on the head until jerked off.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Flowering shoot of Cornflower. 1. Disk-floret in vertical section.]

Compositae are generally considered to represent the most highly developed order of flowering plants. By the massing of the flowers in heads great economy is effected in the material required for one flower, as conspicuousness is ensured by the association; economy of time on the part of the pollinating insect is also effected, as a large number of flowers are visited at one time. The floral mechanism is both simple and effective, favouring cross-pollination, but ensuring self-pollination should that fail. The means of seed-distribution are also very effective.

A few members of the order are of economic value, e.g. _Lactuca_ (lettuce; q.v.), _Cichorium_ (chicory; q.v.), _Cynara_ (artichoke and cardoon; q.v.), _Helianthus_ (Jerusalem artichoke). Many are cultivated as garden or greenhouse plants, such as _Solidago_ (golden rod), _Ageratum_, Aster (q.v.) (Michaelmas daisy), _Helichrysum_ (everlasting), _Zinnia, Rudbeckia, Helianthus_ (sunflower), _Coreopsis_, Dahlia (q.v.), _Tagetes_ (French and African marigold), _Gaillardia, Achillea_ (yarrow), _Chrysanthemum, Pyrethrum_ (feverfew; now generally included under _Chrysanthemum_), _Tanacetum_ (tansy), _Arnica, Doronicum, Cineraria Calendula_ (common marigold) (fig. 1), _Echinops_ (globe thistle), _Centaurea_ (cornflower) (fig. 2). Some are of medicinal value, such as _Anthemis_ (chamomile), _Artemisia_ (wormwood), _Tussilago_ (coltsfoot), _Arnica_. Insect powder is prepared from species of _Pyrethrum_.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Groundsel (_Senecio vulgaris_).

1. Disk-floret. 3. Ray-floret. 2. Same cut vertically. 4. Fruit with pappus.]

The order is divided into two suborders:--_Tubuliflorae_, characterized by absence of latex, and the florets of the disk being not ligulate, and _Liguliflorae_, characterized by presence of latex and all the florets being ligulate. The first suborder contains the majority of the genera, and is divided into a number of tribes, characterized by the form of the anthers and styles, the presence or absence of scales on the receptacle, and the similarity or otherwise of the florets of one and the same head. The order is well represented in Britain, in which forty-two genera are native. These include some of the commonest weeds, such as dandelion (_Taraxacum Dens-leonis_), daisy (_Bellis perennis_), groundsel (fig. 3) (_Senecio vulgaris_) and ragwort (_S. Jacobaea_); coltsfoot (_Tussilago Farfara_) is one of the earliest plants to flower, and other genera are _Chrysanthemum_ (ox-eye daisy and corn-marigold), _Arctium_ (burdock), _Centaurea_ (knapweed and cornflower), _Carduus_ and _Cnicus_ (thistles), _Hieracium_ (hawkweed), _Sonchus_ (sow-thistle), _Achillea_ (yarrow, or milfoil, and sneezewort), _Eupatorium_ (hemp-agrimony), _Gnaphalium_ (cudweed), _Erigeron_ (fleabane), _Solidago_ (golden-rod), _Anthemis_ (may-weed and chamomile), _Cichorium_ (chicory), _Lapsana_ (nipplewort), _Crepis_ (hawk's-beard), _Hypochaeris_ (cat's-ear), and _Tragopogon_ (goat's-beard).

COMPOSITE ORDER, in architecture, a compound of the Ionic and Corinthian orders (see ORDER), the chief characteristic of which is found in the capital (q.v.), where a double row of acanthus leaves, similar to those carved round the Corinthian capital, has been added under the Ionic volutes. The richer decoration of the Ionic capital had already been employed in those of the Erechtheum, where the necking was carved with the palmette or honeysuckle. Similar decorated Ionic capitals were found in the forum of Trajan. The earliest example of the Composite capital is found in the arch of Titus at Rome. The entablature was borrowed from that of the Corinthian order.

COMPOSITION (Lat. _compositio_, from _componere_, to put together), the

## action of putting together and combining, and the product of such

## action. There are many applications of the word. In philology it is used

of the putting together of two distinct words to form a single word; and in grammar, of the combination of words into sentences, and sentences into periods, and then applied to the result of such combination, and to the art of producing a work in prose or verse, or to the work itself. In music "composition" is used both of the art of combining musical sounds in accordance with the rules of musical form, and, more generally, of the whole art of creation or invention. The name "composer" is thus

## particularly applied to the musical creator in general. In the other

fine arts the word is more strictly used of the balanced arrangement of the parts of a picture, of a piece of sculpture or a building, so that they should form one harmonious whole. The word also means an agreement or an adjustment of differences between two or more parties, and is thus the best general term to describe the agreement, often called by the equivalent German word "Ausgleich," between Austria and Hungary in 1867. A more particular use is the legal one, for an agreement by which a creditor agrees to take from his debtor a sum less than his debt in satisfaction of the whole (see BANKRUPTCY). In logic "composition" is the name given to a fallacy of equivocation, where what is true distributively of each member of a class is inferred to be true of the whole class collectively. The fallacy of "division" is the converse of this, where what is true of a term used collectively is inferred to be true of its several parts. A common source of these errors in reasoning is the confusion between the collective and distributive meanings of the word "all." Composition, often shortened to "compo," is the name given to many materials compounded of more than one substance, and is used in various trades and manufactures, as in building, for a mixture, such as stucco, cement and plaster, for covering walls, &c., often made to represent stone or marble; a similar moulded compound is employed to represent carved wood.

COMPOUND (from Lat. _componere_, to combine or put together), a combination of various elements, substances or ingredients, so as to form one composite whole. A "chemical compound" is a substance which can be resolved into simple constituents, as opposed to an element which cannot be so resolved (see CHEMISTRY); a word is said to be a "compound" when it is made up of different words or parts of different words. The term is also used in an adjectival form with many applications; a "compound engine" is one where the expansion of the steam is effected in two or more stages (see STEAM-ENGINE); in zoology, the "compound eye" possessed by insects and crustacea is one which is made up of several _ocelli_ or simple eyes, set together so that the whole has the appearance of being faceted (see EYE); in botany, the "compound leaf" has two or more separate blades on a common leaf-stalk; in surgery, in a "compound fracture" the skin is broken as well as the bone, and there is a communication between the two. There are many mathematical and arithmetical uses of the term, particularly of those forms of addition, multiplication, division and subtraction which deal with quantities of more than one denomination. Compound interest is interest paid upon interest, the accumulation of interest forming, as it were, a secondary principal. The verb "to compound" is used of the arrangement or settlement of differences, and especially of an agreement made to accept or to pay part of a debt in full discharge of the whole, and thus of the arrangement made by an insolvent debtor with his creditors (see BANKRUPTCY); similarly of the substitution of one payment for annual or other periodic payments,--thus subscriptions, university or other dues, &c., may be "compounded"; a particular instance of this is the system of "compounding" for rates, where the occupier of premises pays an increased rent, and the owner makes himself responsible for the payment of the rates. The householder who thus compounds with the owner of the premises he occupies is known as a "compound householder." The payment of poor rate forming part of the qualification necessary for the parliamentary franchise in the United Kingdom, various statutes, leading up to the Compound Householders Act 1851, have enabled such occupiers to claim to be placed on the rate. In law, to compound a felony is to agree with the felon not to prosecute him for his crime, in return for valuable consideration, or, in the case of a theft, on return of the goods stolen. Such an agreement is a misdemeanour and is punishable with fine and imprisonment.

The name "compounders" was given during the reign of William III. of England to the members of a Jacobite faction, who were prepared to restore James II. to the throne, on the condition of an amnesty and an undertaking to preserve the constitution. Until 1853, in the university of Oxford, those possessing private incomes of a certain amount paid special dues for their degrees, and were known as Grand and Petty Compounders.

The corruption "compound" (from the Malay _kampung_ or _kampong_, a quarter of a village) is the name applied to the enclosed ground, whether garden or waste, which surrounds an Anglo-Indian house. In India the European quarter, as a rule, is separate from the native quarter, and consists of a number of single houses, each standing in a compound, sometimes many acres in extent.

COMPOUND PIER, the architectural term given to a clustered column or pier which consists of a centre mass or newel, to which engaged or semi-detached shafts have been attached, in order to perform, or to suggest the performance of, certain definite structural objects, such as to carry arches of additional orders, or to support the transverse or diagonal ribs of a vault, or the tie beam of an important roof. In these cases, though performing different functions, the drums of the pier are often cut out of one stone. There are, however, cases where the shafts are detached from the pier and coupled to it by armulets at regular heights, as in the Early English period.

COMPRADOR (a Portuguese word used in the East, derived from the Lat. _comparare_, to procure), originally a native servant in European households in the East, but now the name given to the native managers in European business houses in China, and also to native contractors supplying ships in the Philippines and elsewhere in the East.

COMPRESSION, in astronomy, the deviation of a heavenly body from the spherical form, called also the "ellipticity." It is numerically expressed by the ratio of the differences of the axes to the major axis of the spheroid. The compression or "flattening" of the earth is about 1/298, which means that the ratio of the equatorial to the polar axis is 298:297 (see Earth, Figure of the). In engineering the term is applied to the arrangement by which the exhaust valve of a steam-engine is made to close, shutting a portion of the exhaust steam in the cylinder, before the stroke of the piston is quite complete. This steam being compressed as the stroke is completed, a cushion is formed against which the piston does work while its velocity is being rapidly reduced, and thus the stresses in the mechanism due to the inertia of the reciprocating parts are lessened. This compression, moreover, obviates the shock which would otherwise be caused by the admission of the fresh steam for the return stroke. In internal combustion engines it is a necessary condition of economy to compress the explosive mixture before it is ignited: in the Otto cycle, for instance, the second stroke of the piston effects the compression of the charge which has been drawn into the cylinder by the first forward stroke.

COMPROMISE (pronounced _cómpr[)o]mize_; through Fr. from Lat. _compromittere_), a term, meaning strictly a joint agreement, which has come to signify such a settlement as involves a mutual adjustment, with a surrender of part of each party's claim. From the element of danger involved has arisen an invidious sense of the word, imputing discredit, so that being "compromised" commonly means injured in reputation.

COMPROMISE MEASURES OF 1850, in American history, a series of measures the object of which was the settlement of five questions in dispute between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States. Three of these questions grew out of the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of western territory as a result of the Mexican War. The settlers who had flocked to California after the discovery of gold in 1848 adopted an anti-slavery state constitution on the 13th of October 1849, and applied for admission into the Union. In the second place it was necessary to form a territorial government for the remainder of the territory acquired from Mexico, including that now occupied by Nevada and Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. The fundamental issue was in regard to the admission of slavery into, or the exclusion of slavery from, this region. Thirdly, there was a dispute over the western boundary of Texas. Should the Rio Grande be the line of division north of Mexico, or should an arbitrary boundary be established farther to the eastward; in other words, should a considerable part of the new territory be certainly opened to slavery as a part of Texas, or possibly closed to it as a part of the organized territorial section? Underlying all of these issues was of course the great moral and political problem as to whether slavery was to be confined to the south-eastern section of the country or be permitted to spread to the Pacific. The two questions not growing out of the Mexican War were in regard to the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and the passage of a new fugitive slave law.

Congress met on the 3rd of December 1849. Neither faction was strong enough in both houses to carry out its own programme, and it seemed for a time that nothing would be done. On the 29th of January 1850 Henry Clay presented the famous resolution which constituted the basis of the ultimate compromise. His idea was to combine the more conservative elements of both sections in favour of a settlement which would concede the Southern view on two questions, the Northern view on two, and balance the fifth. Daniel Webster supported the plan in his great speech of the 7th of March, although in doing so he alienated many of his former admirers. Opposed to the conservatives were the extremists of the North, led by William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, and those of the South, led by Jefferson Davis. Most of the measures were rejected and the whole plan seemed likely to fail, when the situation was changed by the death of President Taylor and the accession of Millard Fillmore on the 9th of July 1850. The influence of the administration was now thrown in favour of the compromise. Under a tacit understanding of the moderates to vote together, five separate bills were passed, and were signed by the president between 9th and 20th September 1850. California was admitted as a free state, and the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia; these were concessions to the North. New Mexico (then including the present Arizona) and Utah were organized without any prohibition of slavery (each being left free to decide for or against, on admission to statehood), and a rigid fugitive slave law was enacted; these were concessions to the South. Texas (q.v.) was compelled to give up much of the western land to which it had a good claim, and received in return $10,000,000.

This legislation had several important results. It helped to postpone secession and Civil War for a decade, during which time the North-West was growing more wealthy and more populous, and was being brought into closer relations with the North-East. It divided the Whigs into "Cotton Whigs" and "Conscience Whigs," and in time led to the downfall of the party. In the third place, the rejection of the Wilmot Proviso and the acceptance (as regards New Mexico and Utah) of "Squatter Sovereignty" meant the adoption of a new principle in dealing with slavery in the territories, which, although it did not apply to the same territory, was antagonistic to the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The sequel was the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854. Fourthly, the enforcement of the fugitive slave law aroused a feeling of bitterness in the North which helped eventually to bring on the war, and helped to make it, when it came, quite as much an anti-slavery crusade as a struggle for the preservation of the Union. Finally, although Clay for his support of the compromises and Seward and Chase for their opposition have gained in reputation, Webster has been selected as the special target for hostile criticism. The Compromise Measures are sometimes spoken of collectively as the Omnibus Bill, owing to their having been grouped originally--when first reported (May 8) to the Senate--into one bill.

The best account of the above Compromises is to be found in J. F. Rhodes, _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850_, vol. i. (New York, 1896). (W. R. S.*)

COMPSA (mod. _Conza_), an ancient city of the Hirpini, near the sources of the Aufidus, on the boundary of Lucania and not far from that of Apulia, on a ridge 1998 ft. above sea-level. It was betrayed to Hannibal in 216 B.C. after the defeat of Cannae, but recaptured two years later. It was probably occupied by Sulla in 89 B.C., and was the scene of the death of T. Annius Milo in 48 B.C. Most authorities (cf. Hülsen in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, Stuttgart, 1901, iv. 797) refer Caes. _Bell. civ._ iii. 22, and Plin. _Hist. Nat._ ii. 147, to this place, supposing the MSS. to be corrupt. The usual identification of the site of Milo's death with Cassano on the Gulf of Taranto must therefore be rejected. In imperial times, as inscriptions show, it was a _municipium_, but it lay far from any of the main high-roads. There are no important ancient remains.

COMPTON, HENRY (1632-1713), English divine, was the sixth and youngest son of the second earl of Northampton. He was educated at Queen's College, Oxford, and then travelled in Europe. After the restoration of Charles II. he became cornet in a regiment of horse, but soon quitted the army for the church. After a further period of study at Cambridge and again at Oxford, he held various livings. He was made bishop of Oxford in 1674, and in the following year was translated to the see of London. He was also appointed a member of the Privy Council, and entrusted with the education of the two princesses--Mary and Anne. He showed a liberality most unusual at the time to Protestant dissenters, whom he wished to reunite with the established church. He held several conferences on the subject with the clergy of his diocese; and in the hope of influencing candid minds by means of the opinions of unbiassed foreigners, he obtained letters treating of the question (since printed at the end of Stillingfleet's _Unreasonableness of Separation_) from Le Moyne; professor of divinity at Leiden, and the famous French Protestant divine, Jean Claude. But to Roman Catholicism he was strongly opposed. On the accession of James II. he consequently lost his seat in the council and his deanery in the Chapel Royal; and for his firmness in refusing to suspend John Sharp, rector of St Giles's-in-the-Fields, whose anti-papal writings had rendered him obnoxious to the king, he was himself suspended. At the Revolution Compton embraced the cause of William and Mary; he performed the ceremony of their coronation; his old position was restored to him; and among other appointments, he was chosen as one of the commissioners for revising the liturgy. During the reign of Anne he remained a member of the privy council, and was one of the commissioners appointed to arrange the terms of the union of England and Scotland; but, to his bitter disappointment, his claims to the primacy were twice passed over. He died at Fulham on the 7th of July 1713. He had conspicuous defects both in spirit and intellect, but was benevolent and philanthropic. He was a successful botanist. He published, besides several theological works, _A Translation from the Italian of the Life of Donna Olympia Maladichini, who governed the Church during the time of Pope Innocent X., which was from the year 1644 to 1655_ (1667), and _A Translation from the French of the Jesuits' Intrigues_ (1669).

COMPTROLLER, the title of an official whose business primarily was to examine and take charge of accounts, hence to direct or control, e.g. the English comptroller of the household, comptroller and auditor-general (head of the exchequer and audit department), comptroller-general of patents, &c., comptroller-general (head of the national debt office). On the other hand, the word is frequently spelt _controller_, as in controller of the navy, controller or head of the stationery office. The word is used in the same sense in the United States, as comptroller of the treasury, an official who examines accounts and signs drafts, and comptroller of the currency, who administers the law relating to the national banks.

COMPURGATION (from Lat. _compurgare_, to purify completely), a mode of procedure formerly employed in ecclesiastical courts, and derived from the canon law (_compurgatio canonica_), by which a clerk who was accused of crime was required to make answers on the oath of himself and a certain number of other clerks (compurgators) who would swear to his character or innocence. The term is more especially applied to a somewhat similar procedure, the old Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon mode of trial by oath-taking or oath-helping (see JURY).

COMTE, AUGUSTE [ISIDORE AUGUSTE MARIE FRANÇOIS XAVIER] (1798-1857), French Positive philosopher, was born on the 19th of January 1798 at Montpellier, where his father was a receiver-general of taxes for the district. He was sent for his earliest instruction to the school of the town, and in 1814 was admitted to the École Polytechnique. His youth was marked by a constant willingness to rebel against merely official authority; to genuine excellence, whether moral or intellectual, he was always ready to pay unbounded deference. That strenuous application which was one of his most remarkable gifts in manhood showed itself in his youth, and his application was backed or inspired by superior intelligence and aptness. After he had been two years at the École Polytechnique he took a foremost part in a mutinous demonstration against one of the masters; the school was broken up, and Comte like the other scholars was sent home. To the great dissatisfaction of his parents, he resolved to return to Paris (1816), and to earn his living there by giving lessons in mathematics. Benjamin Franklin was the youth's idol at this moment. "I seek to imitate the modern Socrates," he wrote to a school friend, "not in talents, but in way of living. 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." Though Comte's character and aims were as far removed as possible from Franklin's type, neither Franklin nor any man that ever lived could surpass him in the heroic tenacity with which, in the face of a thousand obstacles, he pursued his own ideal of a vocation.

For a moment circumstances led him to think of seeking a career in America, but a friend who preceded him thither warned him of the purely practical spirit that prevailed in the new country. "If Lagrange were to come to the United States, he could only earn his livelihood by turning land surveyor." So Comte remained in Paris, living as he best could on something less than £80 a year, and hoping, when he took the trouble to break his meditations upon greater things by hopes about himself, that he might by and by obtain an appointment as mathematical master in a school. A friend procured him a situation as tutor in the house of Casimir Périer. The salary was good, but the duties were too miscellaneous, and what was still worse, there was an end of the delicious liberty of the garret. After a short experience of three weeks Comte returned to neediness and contentment. He was not altogether without the young man's appetite for pleasure; yet when he was only nineteen we find him wondering, amid the gaieties of the carnival of 1817, how a gavotte or a minuet could make people forget that thirty thousand human beings around them had barely a morsel to eat.

Towards 1818 Comte became associated as friend and disciple with Saint-Simon, who was destined to exercise a very decisive influence upon the turn of his speculation. In after years he so far forgot himself as to write of Saint-Simon as a depraved quack, and to deplore his connexion with him as purely mischievous. While the connexion lasted he thought very differently. Saint-Simon is described as the most estimable and lovable of men, and the most delightful in his relations; he is the worthiest of philosophers. Even at the very moment when Comte was congratulating himself on having thrown off the yoke, he honestly admits that Saint-Simon's influence has been of powerful service in his philosophic education. "I certainly," he writes to his most intimate friend, "am under great personal obligations to Saint-Simon; that is to say, he helped in a powerful degree to launch me in the philosophical direction that I have now definitely marked out for myself, and that I shall follow without looking back for the rest of my life." Even if there were no such unmistakable expressions as these, the most cursory glance into Saint-Simon's writings is enough to reveal the thread of connexion between the ingenious visionary and the systematic thinker. We see the debt, and we also see that when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint-Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence. As high a degree of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as Molière and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art. In philosophy the conditions are not different. _Il faut prendre son bien où on le trouve._

It is no detriment to Comte's fame that some of the ideas which he recombined and incorporated in a great philosophic structure had their origin in ideas that were produced almost at random in the incessant fermentation of Saint-Simon's brain. Comte is in no true sense a follower of Saint-Simon, but it was undoubtedly Saint-Simon who launched him, to take Comte's own word, by suggesting the two starting-points of what grew into the Comtist system--first, that political phenomena are as capable of being grouped under laws as other phenomena; and second, that the true destination of philosophy must be social, and the true object of the thinker must be the reorganization of the moral, religious and political systems. We can readily see what an impulse these far-reaching conceptions would give to Comte's meditations. There were conceptions of less importance than these, in which it is impossible not to feel that it was Saint-Simon's wrong or imperfect idea that put his young admirer on the track to a right and perfected idea. The subject is not worthy of further discussion. That Comte would have performed some great intellectual achievement, if Saint-Simon had never been born, is certain. It is hardly less certain that the great achievement which he did actually perform was originally set in motion by Saint-Simon's conversation, though it was afterwards directly filiated with the fertile speculations of A. R. J. Turgot and Condorcet. Comte thought almost as meanly of Plato as he did of Saint-Simon, and he considered Aristotle the prince of all true thinkers; yet their vital difference about Ideas did not prevent Aristotle from calling Plato master.

After six years the differences between the old and the young philosopher grew too marked for friendship. Comte began to fret under Saint-Simon's pretensions to be his director. Saint-Simon, on the other hand, perhaps began to feel uncomfortably conscious of the superiority of his disciple. The occasion of the breach between them (1824) was an attempt on Saint-Simon's part to print a production of Comte's as if it were in some sort connected with Saint-Simon's schemes of social reorganization. Not only was the breach not repaired, but long afterwards Comte, as we have said, with painful ungraciousness took to calling the encourager of his youth by very hard names.

Marriage.

In 1825 Comte married a Mdlle Caroline Massin. His marriage was one of those of which "magnanimity owes no account to prudence," and it did not turn out prosperously. His family were strongly Catholic and royalist, and they were outraged by his refusal to have the marriage performed other than civilly. They consented, however, to receive his wife, and the pair went on a visit to Montpellier. Madame Comte conceived a dislike to the circle she found there, and this was the too early beginning of disputes which lasted for the remainder of their union. In the year of his marriage we find Comte writing to the most intimate of his correspondents:--"I have nothing left but to concentrate my whole moral existence in my intellectual work, a precious but inadequate compensation; and so I must give up, if not the most dazzling, still the sweetest part of my happiness." He tried to find pupils to board with him, but only one pupil came, and he was soon sent away for lack of companions. "I would rather spend an evening," wrote the needy enthusiast, "in solving a difficult question, than in running after some empty-headed and consequential millionaire in search of a pupil." A little money was earned by an occasional article in _Le Producteur_, in which he began to expound the philosophic ideas that were now maturing in his mind. He announced a course of lectures (1826), which it was hoped would bring money as well as fame, and which were to be the first dogmatic exposition of the Positive Philosophy. A friend had said to him, "You talk too freely, your ideas are getting abroad, and other people use them without giving you the credit; put your ownership on record." The lectures attracted hearers so eminent as Humboldt the cosmologist, Poinsot the geometer and Blainville the physiologist.

Serious illness.

Unhappily, after the third lecture of the course, Comte had a severe attack of cerebral derangement, brought on by intense and prolonged meditation, acting on a system that was already irritated by the chagrin of domestic discomfort. He did not recover his health for more than a year, and as soon as convalescence set in he was seized by so profound a melancholy at the disaster which had thus overtaken him, that he threw himself into the Seine. Fortunately he was rescued, and the shock did not stay his return to mental soundness. One incident of this painful episode is worth mentioning. Lamennais, then in the height of his Catholic exaltation, persuaded Comte's mother to insist on her son being married with the religious ceremony, and as the younger Madame Comte apparently did not resist, the rite was duly performed, in spite of the fact that Comte was at the time raving mad. Philosophic assailants of Comtism have not always resisted the temptation to recall the circumstance that its founder was once out of his mind. As has been justly said, if Newton once suffered a cerebral attack without forfeiting our veneration for the _Principia_, Comte may have suffered in the same way, and still not have forfeited our respect for Positive Philosophy and Positive Polity.

Official work.

In 1828 the lectures were renewed, and in 1830 was published the first volume of the _Course of Positive Philosophy_. The sketch and ground plan of this great undertaking had appeared in 1826. The sixth and last volume was published in 1842. The twelve years covering the publication of the first of Comte's two elaborate works were years of indefatigable toil, and they were the only portion of his life in which he enjoyed a certain measure, and that a very modest measure, of material prosperity. In 1833 he was appointed examiner of the boys who in the various provincial schools aspired to enter the École Polytechnique at Paris. This and two other engagements as a teacher of mathematics secured him an income of some £400 a year. He made M. Guizot, then Louis Philippe's minister, the important proposal to establish a chair of general history of the sciences. If there are four chairs, he argued, devoted to the history of philosophy, that is to say, the minute study of all sorts of dreams and aberrations through the ages, surely there ought to be at least one to explain the formation and progress of our real knowledge? This wise suggestion, still unfulfilled, was at first welcomed, according to Comte's own account, by Guizot's philosophic instinct, and then repulsed by his "metaphysical rancour."

Meanwhile Comte did his official work conscientiously, sorely as he grudged the time which it took from the execution of the great object of his thoughts. "I hardly know if even to you," he writes to his wife, "I dare disclose the sweet and softened feeling that comes over me when I find a young man whose examination is thoroughly satisfactory. Yes, though you may smile, the emotion would easily stir me to tears if I were not carefully on my guard." Such sympathy with youthful hope, in union with industry and intelligence, shows that Comte's dry and austere manner veiled the fires of a generous social emotion. It was this which made him add to his labours the burden of delivering every year from 1831 to 1848 a course of gratuitous lectures on astronomy for a popular audience. The social feeling that inspired this disinterested act showed itself in other ways. He suffered imprisonment rather than serve in the national guard; his position was that though he would not take arms against the new monarchy of July, yet being a republican he would take no oath to defend it. The only amusement that Comte permitted himself was a visit to the opera. In his youth he had been a playgoer, but he shortly came to the conclusion that tragedy is a stilted and bombastic art, and after a time comedy interested him no more than tragedy. For the opera he had a genuine passion, which he gratified as often as he could, until his means became too narrow to afford even that single relaxation.

Of his manner and personal appearance we have the following account from one who was his pupil:--"Daily as the clock struck eight on the horologe of the Luxembourg, while the ringing hammer on the bell was yet audible, the door of my room opened, and there entered a man, short, rather stout, almost what one might call sleek, freshly shaven, without vestige of whisker or moustache. He was invariably dressed in a suit of the most spotless black, as if going to a dinner party; his white neck-cloth was fresh from the laundress's hands, and his hat shining like a racer's coat. He advanced to the arm-chair prepared for him in the centre of the writing-table, laid his hat on the left-hand corner; his snuff-box was deposited on the same side beside the quire of paper placed in readiness for his use, and dipping the pen twice into the ink-bottle, then bringing it to within an inch of his nose to make sure it was properly filled, he broke silence: 'We have said that the chord AB,' &c. For three-quarters of an hour he continued his demonstration, making short notes as he went on, to guide the listener in repeating the problem alone; then, taking up another cahier which lay beside him, he went over the written repetition of the former lesson. He explained, corrected or commented till the clock struck nine; then, with the little finger of the right hand brushing from his coat and waistcoat the shower of superfluous snuff which had fallen on them, he pocketed his snuff-box, and resuming his hat, he as silently as when he came in made his exit by the door which I rushed to open for him."

Completion of "Positive Philosophy."

In 1842, as we have said, the last volume of the _Positive Philosophy_ was given to the public. Instead of that contentment which we like to picture as the reward of twelve years of meritorious toil devoted to the erection of a high philosophic edifice, Comte found himself in the midst of a very sea of small troubles, of that uncompensated kind that harass without elevating, and waste a man's spirit without softening or enlarging it. First, the jar of temperament between Comte and his wife had become so unbearable that they separated (1842). We know too little of the facts to allot blame to either of them. In spite of one or two disadvantageous facts in her career, Madame Comte seems to have uniformly comported herself towards her husband with an honourable solicitude for his well-being. Comte made her an annual allowance, and for some years after the separation they corresponded on friendly terms. Next in the list of the vexations was a lawsuit with his publisher. The publisher had inserted in the sixth volume a protest against a certain footnote, in which Comte had used some hard words about Arago. Comte threw himself into the suit with an energy worthy of Voltaire and won it. Third, and worst of all, he had prefixed a preface to the sixth volume, in which he went out of his way to rouse the enmity of the men on whom depended his annual re-election to the post of examiner for the Polytechnic school. The result was that he lost the appointment, and with it one-half of his very modest income. This was the occasion of an episode, which is of more than merely personal interest.

J. S. Mill.

Before 1842 Comte had been in correspondence with J. S. Mill, who had been greatly impressed by Comte's philosophic ideas; Mill admits that his own _System of Logic_ owes many valuable thoughts to Comte, and that, in the portion of that work which treats of the logic of the moral sciences, a radical improvement in the conceptions of logical method was derived from the _Positive Philosophy_. Their correspondence, which was full and copious, turned principally upon the two great questions of the equality between men and women, and of the expediency and constitution of a sacerdotal or spiritual order. When Comte found himself straitened, he confided the entire circumstances to Mill. As might be supposed by those who know the affectionate anxiety with which Mill regarded the welfare of any one whom he believed to be doing good work in the world, he at once took pains to have Comte's loss of income made up to him, until Comte should have had time to repair that loss by his own endeavour. Mill persuaded Grote, Molesworth, and Raikes Currie to advance the sum of £240. At the end of the year (1845) Comte had taken no steps to enable himself to dispense with the aid of the three Englishmen. Mill applied to them again, but with the exception of Grote, who sent a small sum, they gave Comte to understand that they expected him to earn his own living. Mill had suggested to Comte that he should write articles for the English periodicals, and expressed his own willingness to translate any such articles from the French. Comte at first fell in with the plan, but he speedily surprised and disconcerted Mill by boldly taking up the position of "high moral magistrate," and accusing the three defaulting contributors of a scandalous falling away from righteousness and a high mind. Mill was chilled by these pretensions; and the correspondence came to an end. There is something to be said for both sides. Comte, regarding himself as the promoter of a great scheme for the benefit of humanity, might reasonably look for the support of his friends in the fulfilment of his designs. But Mill and the others were fully justified in not aiding the propagation of a doctrine in which they might not wholly concur. Comte's subsequent attitude of censorious condemnation put him entirely in the wrong.

From 1845 to 1848 Comte lived as best he could, as well as made his wife her allowance, on an income of £200 a year. His little account books of income and outlay, with every item entered down to a few hours before his death, are accurate and neat enough to have satisfied an ancient Roman householder. In 1848, through no fault of his own, his salary was reduced to £80. Littré and others, with Comte's approval, published an appeal for subscriptions, and on the money thus contributed Comte subsisted for the remaining nine years of his life. By 1852 the subsidy produced as much as £200 a year. It is worth noticing that Mill was one of the subscribers, and that Littré continued his assistance after he had been driven from Comte's society by his high pontifical airs. We are sorry not to be able to record any similar trait of magnanimity on Comte's part. His character, admirable as it is for firmness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that make us love good men and pity bad ones.

Literary method.

It is best to think of him only as the intellectual worker, pursuing in uncomforted obscurity the laborious and absorbing task to which he had given up his whole life. His singularly conscientious fashion of elaborating his ideas made the mental strain more intense than even so exhausting a work as the abstract exposition of the principles of positive science need have been. He did not write down a word until he had first composed the whole matter in his mind. When he had thoroughly meditated every sentence, he sat down to write, and then, such was the grip of his memory, the exact order of his thoughts came back to him as if without an effort, and he wrote down precisely what he had intended to write, without the aid of a note or a memorandum, and without check or pause. For example, he began and completed in about six weeks a

## chapter in the _Positive Philosophy_ (vol. v. ch. 55) which would fill

forty pages of this Encyclopaedia. When we reflect that the chapter is not narrative, but an abstract exposition of the guiding principles of the movements of several centuries, with many threads of complex thought running along side by side all through the speculation, then the circumstances under which it was reduced to literary form are really astonishing. It is hardly possible, however, to share the admiration expressed by some of Comte's disciples for his style. We are not so unreasonable as to blame him for failing to make his pages picturesque or thrilling; we do not want sunsets and stars and roses and ecstasy; but there is a certain standard for the most serious and abstract subjects. When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's, Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Comte's manner is heavy, laboured, monotonous, without relief and without light. There is now and then an energetic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune; the sentences are overloaded; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deadened the effect beyond the endurance of all but the most resolute students. Only the interest of the matter prevents one from thinking of Rivarol's ill-natured remark upon Condorcet, that he wrote with opium on a page of lead. The general effect is impressive, not by any virtues of style, for we do not discern one, but by reason of the magnitude and importance of the undertaking, and the visible conscientiousness and the grasp with which it is executed. It is by sheer strength of thought, by the vigorous perspicacity with which he strikes the lines of cleavage of his subject, that he makes his way into the mind of the reader; in the presence of gifts of this power we need not quarrel with an ungainly style.

Hygiène cérébrale.

Comte pursued one practice which ought to be mentioned in connexion with his personal history, the practice of what he style _hygiène cérébrale_. After he had acquired what he considered to be a sufficient stock of material, and this happened before he had completed the _Positive Philosophy_, he abstained from reading newspapers, reviews, scientific transactions and everything else, except two or three poets (notably Dante) and the _Imitatio Christi_. It is true that his friends kept him informed of what was going on in the scientific world. Still this

## partial divorce of himself from the record of the social and scientific

## activity of his time, though it may save a thinker from the deplorable

evils of dispersion, moral and intellectual, accounts in no small measure for the exaggerated egoism, and the absence of all feeling for reality, which marked Comte's later days.

Madame de Vaux.

In 1845 Comte made the acquaintance of Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a lady whose husband had been sent to the galleys for life. Very little is known about her qualities. She wrote a little piece which Comte rated so preposterously as to talk about George Sand in the same sentence; it is in truth a flimsy performance, though it contains one or two gracious thoughts. There is true beauty in the saying--"_It is unworthy of a noble nature to diffuse its pain._" Madame de Vaux's letters speak well for her good sense and good feeling, and it would have been better for Comte's later work if she had survived to exert a wholesome restraint on his exaltation. Their friendship had only lasted a year when she died (1846), but the period was long enough to give her memory a supreme ascendancy in Comte's mind. Condillac, Joubert, Mill and other eminent men have shown what the intellectual ascendancy of a woman can be. Comte was as inconsolable after Madame de Vaux's death as D'Alembert after the death of Mademoiselle L'Espinasse. Every Wednesday afternoon he made a reverential pilgrimage to her tomb, and three times every day he invoked her memory in words of passionate expansion. His disciples believe that in time the world will reverence Comte's sentiment about Clotilde de Vaux, as it reveres Dante's adoration of Beatrice--a parallel that Comte himself was the first to hit upon. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet. Whatever other gifts Comte may have had--and he had many of the rarest kind,--poetic imagination was not among them, any more than poetic or emotional expression was among them. His was one of those natures whose faculty of deep feeling is unhappily doomed to be inarticulate, and to pass away without the magic power of transmitting itself.

Positive Polity.

Comte lost no time, after the completion of his _Course of Positive Philosophy_, in proceeding with the _System of Positive Polity_, for which the earlier work was designed to be a foundation. The first volume was published in 1851, and the fourth and last in 1854. In 1848, when the political air was charged with stimulating elements, he founded the Positive Society, with the expectation that it might grow into a reunion as powerful over the new revolution as the Jacobin Club had been in the revolution of 1789. The hope was not fulfilled, but a certain number of philosophic disciples gathered round Comte, and eventually formed themselves, under the guidance of the new ideas of the latter half of his life, into a kind of church, for whose use was drawn up the _Positivist Calendar_ (1849), in which the names of those who had advanced civilization replaced the titles of the saints. Gutenberg and Shakespeare were among the patrons of the thirteen months in this calendar. In the years 1849, 1850 and 1851 Comte gave three courses of lectures at the Palais Royal. They were gratuitous and popular, and in them he boldly advanced the whole of his doctrine, as well as the direct and immediate pretensions of himself and his system. The third course ended in the following uncompromising terms--"In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of Humanity--both its philosophical and its practical servants--come forward to claim as their due the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all departments,--moral, intellectual and material. Consequently they exclude once for all from political supremacy all the different servants of God--Catholic, Protestant or Deist--as being at once behindhand and a cause of disturbance." A few weeks after this invitation, a very different person stepped forward to constitute himself a real Providence.

In 1852 Comte published the _Catechism of Positivism_. In the preface to it he took occasion to express his approval of Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_ of the 2nd of December,--"a fortunate crisis which has set aside the parliamentary system and instituted a dictatorial republic." Whatever we may think of the political sagacity of such a judgment, it is due to Comte to say that he did not expect to see his dictatorial republic transformed into a dynastic empire, and, next, that he did expect from the Man of December freedom of the press and of public meeting. His later hero was the emperor Nicholas, "the only statesman in Christendom,"--as unlucky a judgment as that which placed Dr Francia in the Comtist Calendar.

Death.

In 1857 he was attacked by cancer, and died peaceably on the 5th of September of that year. The anniversary is celebrated by ceremonial gatherings of his French and English followers, who then commemorate the name and the services of the founder of their religion. By his will he appointed thirteen executors who were to preserve his rooms at 10 rue Monsieur-le-Prince as the headquarters of the new religion of Humanity.

Comte's philosophic consistency.

Early writing.

In proceeding to give an Outline of Comte's system, we shall consider the _Positive Polity_ as the more or less legitimate sequel of the _Positive Philosophy_, notwithstanding the deep gulf which so eminent a critic as J. S. Mill insisted upon fixing between the earlier and the later work. There may be, as we think there is, the greatest difference in their value, and the temper is not the same, nor the method. But the two are quite capable of being regarded, and for the purposes of an account of Comte's career ought to be regarded, as an integral whole. His letters when he was a young man of one-and-twenty, and before he had published a word, show how strongly present the social motive was in his mind, and in what little account he should hold his scientific works, if he did not perpetually think of their utility for the species. "I feel," he wrote, "that such scientific reputation as I might acquire would give more value, more weight, more useful influence to my political sermons." In 1822 he published a _Plan of the Scientific Works necessary to reorganize Society_. In this he points out that modern society is passing through a great crisis, due to the conflict of two opposing movements,--the first, a disorganizing movement owing to the break-up of old institutions and beliefs; the second, a movement towards a definite social state, in which all means of human prosperity will receive their most complete development and most direct application. How is this crisis to be dealt with? What are the undertakings necessary in order to pass successfully through it towards an organic state? The answer to this is that there are two series of works. The first is theoretic or spiritual, aiming at the development of a new principle of co-ordinating social relations, and the formation of the system of general ideas which are destined to guide society. The second work is practical or temporal; it settles the distribution of power, and the institutions that are most conformable to the spirit of the system which has previously been thought out in the course of the theoretic work. As the practical work depends on the conclusions of the theoretical, the latter must obviously come first in order of execution.

In 1826 this was pushed farther in a most remarkable piece called _Considerations on the Spiritual Power_--the main object of which is to demonstrate the necessity of instituting a spiritual power, distinct from the temporal power and independent of it. In examining the conditions of a spiritual power proper for modern times, he indicates in so many terms the presence in his mind of a direct analogy between his proposed spiritual power and the functions of the Catholic clergy at the time of its greatest vigour and most complete independence,--that is to say, from about the middle of the 11th century until towards the end of the 13th. He refers to de Maistre's memorable book, _Du Pape_, as the most profound, accurate and methodical account of the old spiritual organization, and starts from that as the model to be adapted to the changed intellectual and social conditions of the modern time. In the _Positive Philosophy_, again (vol. v. p. 344), he distinctly says that Catholicism, reconstituted as a system on new intellectual foundations, would finally preside over the spiritual reorganization of modern society. Much else could be quoted to the same effect. If unity of career, then, means that Comte, from the beginning designed the institution of a spiritual power, and the systematic reorganization of life, it is difficult to deny him whatever credit that unity may be worth, and the credit is perhaps not particularly great. Even the readaptation of the Catholic system to a scientific doctrine was plainly in his mind thirty years before the final execution of the _Positive Polity_, though it is difficult to believe that he foresaw the religious mysticism in which the task was to land him. A great analysis was to precede a great synthesis, but it was the synthesis on which Comte's vision was centred from the first. Let us first sketch the nature of the analysis. Society is to be reorganized on the base of knowledge. What is the sum and significance of knowledge? That is the question which Comte's first master-work professes to answer.

Law of the Three States.

The _Positive Philosophy_ opens with the statement of a certain law of which Comte was the discoverer, and which has always been treated both by disciples and dissidents as the key to his system. This is the Law of the Three States. It is as follows. Each of our leading conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes successively through three different phases; there are three different ways in which the human mind explains phenomena, each way following the other in order. These three stages are the Theological, the Metaphysical and the Positive. Knowledge, or a branch of knowledge, is in the Theological state, when it supposes the phenomena under consideration to be due to immediate volition, either in the object or in some supernatural being. In the Metaphysical state, for volition is substituted abstract force residing in the object, yet existing independently of the object; the phenomena are viewed as if apart from the bodies manifesting them; and the properties of each substance have attributed to them an existence distinct from that substance. In the Positive state, inherent volition or external volition and inherent force or abstraction personified have both disappeared from men's minds, and the explanation of a phenomenon means a reference of it, by way of succession or resemblance, to some other phenomenon,--means the establishment of a relation between the given fact and some more general fact. In the Theological and Metaphysical state men seek a cause or an essence; in the Positive they are content with a law. To borrow an illustration from an able English disciple of Comte:--"Take the phenomenon of the sleep produced by opium. The Arabs are content to attribute it to the 'will of God.' Molière's medical student accounts for it by a _soporific principle_ contained in the opium. The modern physiologist knows that he cannot account for it at all. He can simply observe, analyse and experiment upon the phenomena attending the action of the drug, and classify it with other agents analogous in character."--(_Dr Bridges._)

The first and greatest aim of the Positive Philosophy is to advance the study of society into the third of the three stages,--to remove social phenomena from the sphere of theological and metaphysical conceptions, and to introduce among them the same scientific observation of their laws which has given us physics, chemistry, physiology. Social physics will consist of the conditions and relations of the facts of society, and will have two departments,--one, statical, containing the laws of order; the other dynamical, containing the laws of progress. While men's minds were in the theological state, political events, for example, were explained by the will of the gods, and political authority based on divine right. In the metaphysical state of mind, then, to retain our instance, political authority was based on the sovereignty of the people, and social facts were explained by the figment of a falling away from a state of nature. When the positive method has been finally extended to society, as it has been to chemistry and physiology, these social facts will be resolved, as their ultimate analysis, into relations with one another, and instead of seeking causes in the old sense of the word, men will only examine the conditions of social existence. When that stage has been reached, not merely the greater part, but the whole, of our knowledge will be impressed with one character, the character, namely, of positivity or scientificalness; and all our conceptions in every part of knowledge will be thoroughly homogeneous. The gains of such a change are enormous. The new philosophical unity will now in its turn regenerate all the elements that went to its own formation. The mind will pursue knowledge without the wasteful jar and friction of conflicting methods and mutually hostile conceptions; education will be regenerated; and society will reorganize itself on the only possible solid base--a homogeneous philosophy.

Classification of sciences.

The _Positive Philosophy_ has another object besides the demonstration of the necessity and propriety of a science of society. This object is to show the sciences as branches from a single trunk,--is to give to science the ensemble or spirit or generality hitherto confined to philosophy, and to give to philosophy the rigour and solidity of science. Comte's special object is a study of social physics, a science that before his advent was still to be formed; his second object is a review of the methods and leading generalities of all the positive sciences already formed, so that we may know both what system of inquiry to follow in our new science, and also where the new science will stand in relation to other knowledge.

The first step in this direction is to arrange scientific method and positive knowledge in order, and this brings us to another cardinal element in the Comtist system, the classification of the sciences. In the front of the inquiry lies one main division, that, namely, between speculative and practical knowledge. With the latter we have no concern. Speculative or theoretic knowledge is divided into abstract and concrete. The former is concerned with the laws that regulate phenomena in all conceivable cases: the latter is concerned with the application of these laws. Concrete science relates to objects or beings; abstract science to events. The former is particular or descriptive; the latter is general. Thus, physiology is an abstract science; but zoology is concrete. Chemistry is abstract; mineralogy is concrete. It is the method and knowledge of the abstract sciences that the Positive Philosophy has to reorganize in a great whole.

Comte's principle of classification is that the dependence and order of scientific study follows the dependence of the phenomena. Thus, as has been said, it represents both the objective dependence of the phenomena and the subjective dependence of our means of knowing them. The more

## particular and complex phenomena depend upon the simpler and more

general. The latter are the more easy to study. Therefore science will begin with those attributes of objects which are most general, and pass on gradually to other attributes that are combined in greater complexity. Thus, too, each science rests on the truths of the sciences that precede it, while it adds to them the truths by which it is itself constituted. Comte's series or hierarchy is arranged as follows:--(1) Mathematics (that is, number, geometry, and mechanics), (2) Astronomy, (3) Physics, (4) Chemistry, (5) Biology, (6) Sociology. Each of the members of this series is one degree more special than the member before it, and depends upon the facts of all the members preceding it, and cannot be fully understood without them. It follows that the crowning science of the hierarchy, dealing with the phenomena of human society, will remain longest under the influence of theological dogmas and abstract figments, and will be the last to pass into the positive stage. You cannot discover the relations of the facts of human society without reference to the conditions of animal life; you cannot understand the conditions of animal life without the laws of chemistry; and so with the rest.

The double key of positive philosophy.

This arrangement of the sciences, and the Law of the Three States, are together explanatory of the course of human thought and knowledge. They are thus the double key of Comte's systematization of the philosophy of all the sciences from mathematics to physiology, and his analysis of social evolution, which is the base of sociology. Each science contributes its philosophy. The co-ordination of all these partial philosophies produces the general Positive Philosophy. "Thousands had cultivated science, and with splendid success; not one had conceived the philosophy which the sciences when organized would naturally evolve. A few had seen the necessity of extending the scientific method to all inquiries, but no one had seen how this was to be effected.... The Positive Philosophy is novel as a philosophy, not as a collection of truths never before suspected. Its novelty is the organization of existing elements. Its very principle implies the absorption of all that great thinkers had achieved; while incorporating their results it extended their methods.... What tradition brought was the results; what Comte brought was the organization of these results. He always claimed to be the founder of the Positive Philosophy. That he had every right to such a title is demonstrable to all who distinguish between the positive sciences and the philosophy which co-ordinated the truths and methods of these sciences into a doctrine."--_G. H. Lewes._

Criticism on Comte's classification.

Comte's classification of the sciences has been subjected to a vigorous criticism by Herbert Spencer. Spencer's two chief points are these:--(1) He denies that the principle of the development of the sciences is the principle of decreasing generality; he asserts that there are as many examples of the advent of a science being determined by increasing generality as by increasing speciality. (2) He holds that any grouping of the sciences in a succession gives a radically wrong idea of their genesis and their interdependence; no true filiation exists; no science develops itself in isolation; no one is independent, either logically or historically. Littré, by far the most eminent of the scientific followers of Comte, concedes a certain force to Spencer's objections, and makes certain secondary modifications in the hierarchy in consequence, while still cherishing his faith in the Comtist theory of the sciences. J. S. Mill, while admitting the objections as good, if Comte's arrangement pretended to be the only one possible, still holds the arrangement as tenable for the purpose with which it was devised. G. H. Lewes asserts against Spencer that the arrangement in a series is necessary, on grounds similar to those which require that the various truths constituting a science should be systematically co-ordinated although in nature the phenomena are intermingled.

The first three volumes of the _Positive Philosophy_ contain an exposition of the partial philosophies of the five sciences that precede sociology in the hierarchy. Their value has usually been placed very low by the special followers of the sciences concerned; they say that the knowledge is second-hand, is not coherent, and is too confidently taken for final. The Comtist replies that the task is philosophic; and is not to be judged by the minute accuracies of science. In these three volumes Comte took the sciences roughly as he found them. His eminence as a man of science must be measured by his only original work in that department,--the construction, namely, of the new science of society. This work is accomplished in the last three volumes of the _Positive Philosophy_, and the second and third volumes of the _Positive Polity_. The Comtist maintains that even if these five volumes together fail in laying down correctly and finally the lines of the new science, still they are the first solution of a great problem hitherto unattempted. "Modern biology has got beyond Aristotle's conception; but in the construction of the biological science, not even the most unphilosophical biologist would fail to recognize the value of Aristotle's attempt. So for sociology. Subsequent sociologists may have conceivably to remodel the whole science, yet not the less will they recognize the merit of the first work which has facilitated their labours."--_Congreve._

Sociological conceptions.

Method.

We shall now briefly describe Comte's principal conceptions in sociology, his position in respect to which is held by himself, and by others, to raise him to the level of Descartes or Leibnitz. Of course the first step was to approach the phenomena of human character and social existence with the expectation of finding them as reducible to general laws as the other phenomena of the universe, and with the hope of exploring these laws by the same instruments of observation and verification as had done such triumphant work in the case of the latter. Comte separates the collective facts of society and history from the individual phenomena of biology; then he withdraws these collective facts from the region of external volition, and places them in the region of law. The facts of history must be explained, not by providential interventions, but by referring them to conditions inherent in the successive stages of social existence. This conception makes a science of society possible. What is the method? It comprises, besides observation and experiment (which is, in fact, only the observation of abnormal social states), a certain peculiarity of verification. We begin by deducing every well-known historical situation from the series of its antecedents. Thus we acquire a body of empirical generalizations as to social phenomena, and then we connect the generalizations with the positive theory of human nature. A sociological demonstration lies in the establishment of an accordance between the conclusions of historical analysis and the preparatory conceptions of biological theory. As Mill puts it:--"If a sociological theory, collected from historical evidence, contradicts the established general laws of human nature; if (to use M. Comte's instances) it implies, in the mass of mankind, any very decided natural bent, either in a good or in a bad direction; if it supposes that the reason, in average human beings, predominates over the desires, or the disinterested desires over the personal,--we may know that history has been misinterpreted, and that the theory is false. On the other hand, if laws of social phenomena, empirically generalized from history, can, when once suggested, be affiliated to the known laws of human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and changes of human society, can be seen to be such as the properties of man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, the empirical generalizations are raised into positive laws, and sociology becomes a science." The result of this method, is an exhibition of the events of human experience in co-ordinated series that manifest their own graduated connexion.

Next, as all investigation proceeds from that which is known best to that which is unknown or less well known, and as, in social states, it is the collective phenomenon that is more easy of access to the observer than its parts, therefore we must consider and pursue all the elements of a given social state together and in common. The social organization must be viewed and explored as a whole. There is a nexus between each leading group of social phenomena and other leading groups; if there is a change in one of them, that change is accompanied by a corresponding modification of all the rest. "Not only must political institutions and social manners, on the one hand, and manners and ideas, on the other, be always mutually connected; but further, this consolidated whole must be always connected by its nature with the corresponding state of the integral development of humanity, considered in all its aspects of intellectual, moral and physical activity."--_Comte._

Decisive Importance of Intellectual development.

Is there any one element which communicates the decisive impulse to all the rest,--any predominating agency in the course of social evolution? The answer is that all the other parts of social existence are associated with, and drawn along by, the contemporary condition of intellectual development. The Reason is the superior and preponderant element which settles the direction in which all the other faculties shall expand. "It is only through the more and more marked influence of the reason over the general conduct of man and of society, that the gradual march of our race has attained that regularity and persevering continuity which distinguish it so radically from the desultory and barren expansion of even the highest animal orders, which share, and with enhanced strength, the appetites, the passions, and even the primary sentiments of man." The history of intellectual development, therefore, is the key to social evolution, and the key to the history of intellectual development is the Law of the Three States.

Among other central thoughts in Comte's explanation of history are these:--The displacement of theological by positive conceptions has been accompanied by a gradual rise of an industrial régime out of the military régime;--the great permanent contribution of Catholicism was the separation which it set up between the temporal and the spiritual powers;--the progress of the race consists in the increasing preponderance of the distinctively human elements over the animal elements;--the absolute tendency of ordinary social theories will be replaced by an unfailing adherence to the relative point of view, and from this it follows that the social state, regarded as a whole, has been as perfect in each period as the co-existing condition of humanity and its environment would allow.

The elaboration of these ideas in relation to the history of the civilization of the most advanced portion of the human race occupies two of the volumes of the _Positive Philosophy_, and has been accepted by very different schools as a masterpiece of rich, luminous, and far-reaching suggestion. Whatever additions it may receive, and whatever corrections it may require, this analysis of social evolution will continue to be regarded as one of the great achievements of human intellect.

Social dynamics in the Positive Polity.

The third volume of the _Positive Polity_ treats of social dynamics, and takes us again over the ground of historic evolution. It abounds with remarks of extraordinary fertility and comprehensiveness; but it is often arbitrary; and its views of the past are strained into coherence with the statical views of the preceding volume. As it was composed in rather less than six months, and as the author honestly warns us that he has given all his attention to a more profound co-ordination, instead of working out the special explanations more fully, as he had promised, we need not be surprised if the result is disappointing to those who had mastered the corresponding portion of the _Positive Philosophy_. Comte explains the difference between his two works. In the first his "chief object was to discover and demonstrate the laws of progress, and to exhibit in one unbroken sequence the collective destinies of mankind, till then invariably regarded as a series of events wholly beyond the reach of explanation, and almost depending on arbitrary will. The present work, on the contrary, is addressed to those who are already sufficiently convinced of the certain existence of social laws, and desire only to have them reduced to a true and conclusive system."

The Positivist system.

The Religion of humanity.

The main principles of the Comtian system are derived from the _Positive Polity_ and from two other works,--the _Positivist Catechism: a Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion, in Twelve Dialogues between a Woman and a Priest of Humanity_; and, second, _The Subjective Synthesis_ (1856), which is the first and only volume of a work upon mathematics announced at the end of the _Positive Philosophy_. The system for which the _Positive Philosophy_ is alleged to have been the scientific preparation contains a Polity and a Religion; a complete arrangement of life in all its aspects, giving a wider sphere to Intellect, Energy and Feeling than could be found in any of the previous organic types,--Greek, Roman or Catholic-feudal. Comte's immense superiority over such prae-Revolutionary utopians as the Abbé Saint Pierre, no less than over the group of post-revolutionary Utopians, is especially visible in this firm grasp of the cardinal truth that the improvement of the social organism can only be effected by a moral development, and never by any changes in mere political mechanism, or any violences in the way of an artificial redistribution of wealth. A moral transformation must precede any real advance. The aim, both in public and private life, is to secure to the utmost possible extent the victory of the social feeling over self-love, or Altruism over Egoism.[1] This is the key to the regeneration of social existence, as it is the key to that unity of individual life which makes all our energies converge freely and without wasteful friction towards a common end. What are the instruments for securing the preponderance of Altruism? Clearly they must work from the strongest element in human nature, and this element is Feeling or the Heart. Under the Catholic system the supremacy of Feeling was abused, and the Intellect was made its slave. Then followed a revolt of Intellect against Sentiment. The business of the new system will be to bring back the Intellect into a condition, not of slavery, but of willing ministry to the Feelings. The subordination never was, and never will be, effected except by means of a religion, and a religion, to be final, must include a harmonious synthesis of all our conceptions of the external order of the universe. The characteristic basis of a religion is the existence of a Power without us, so superior to ourselves as to command the complete submission of our whole life. This basis is to be found in the Positive stage, in Humanity, past, present and to come, conceived as the Great Being.

"A deeper study of the great universal order reveals to us at length the ruling power within it of the true Great Being, whose destiny it is to bring that order continually to perfection by constantly conforming to its laws, and which thus best represents to us that system as a whole. This undeniable Providence, the supreme dispenser of our destinies, becomes in the natural course the common centre of our affections, our thoughts, and our actions. Although this Great Being evidently exceeds the utmost strength of any, even of any collective, human force, its necessary constitution and its peculiar function endow it with the truest sympathy towards all its servants. The least amongst us can and ought constantly to aspire to maintain and even to improve this Being. This natural object of all our

## activity, both public and private, determines the true general

character of the rest of our existence, whether in feeling or in thought; which must be devoted to love, and to know, in order rightly to serve, our Providence, by a wise use of all the means which it furnishes to us. Reciprocally this continued service, whilst strengthening our true unity, renders us at once both happier and better."

Remarks on the religion.

The exaltation of Humanity into the throne occupied by the Supreme Being under monotheistic systems made all the rest of Comte's construction easy enough. Utility remains the test of every institution, impulse, act; his fabric becomes substantially an arch of utilitarian propositions, with an artificial Great Being inserted at the top to keep them in their place. The Comtist system is utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic decoration. Translated into the plainest English, the position is as follows: "Society can only be regenerated by the greater subordination of politics to morals, by the moralization of capital, by the renovation of the family, by a higher conception of marriage and so on. These ends can only be reached by a heartier development of the sympathetic instincts. The sympathetic instincts can only be developed by the Religion of Humanity." Looking at the problem in this way, even a moralist who does not expect theology to be the instrument of social revival, might still ask whether the sympathetic instincts will not necessarily be already developed to their highest point, before people will be persuaded to accept the religion, which is at the bottom hardly more than sympathy under a more imposing name. However that may be, the whole battle--into which we shall not enter--as to the legitimateness of Comtism as a religion turns upon this erection of Humanity into a Being. The various hypotheses, dogmas, proposals, as to the family, to capital, &c., are merely propositions measurable by considerations of utility and a balance of expediencies. Many of these proposals are of the highest interest, and many of them are actually available; but there does not seem to be one of them of an available kind, which could not equally well be approached from other sides, and even incorporated in some radically antagonistic system. Adoption, for example, as a practice for improving the happiness of families and the welfare of society, is capable of being weighed, and can in truth only be weighed, by utilitarian considerations, and has been commended by men to whom the Comtist religion is naught. The singularity of Comte's construction, and the test by which it must be tried, is the transfer of the worship and discipline of Catholicism to a system in which "the conception of God is superseded" by the abstract idea of Humanity, conceived as a kind of Personality.

And when all is said, the invention does not help us. We have still to settle what _is_ for the good of Humanity, and we can only do that in the old-fashioned way. There is no guidance in the conception. No effective unity can follow from it, because you can only find out the right and wrong of a given course by summing up the advantages and disadvantages, and striking a balance, and there is nothing in the Religion of Humanity to force two men to find the balance on the same side. The Comtists are no better off than other utilitarians in judging policy, events, conduct.

The worship and discipline.

The particularities of the worship, its minute and truly ingenious re-adaptations of sacraments, prayers, reverent signs, down even to the invocation of a New Trinity, need not detain us. They are said, though it is not easy to believe, to have been elaborated by way of Utopia. If so, no Utopia has ever yet been presented in a style so little calculated to stir the imagination, to warm the feelings, to soothe the insurgency of the reason. It is a mistake to present a great body of hypotheses--if Comte meant them for hypotheses--in the most dogmatic and peremptory form to which language can lend itself. And there is no more extraordinary thing in the history of opinion than the perversity with which Comte has succeeded in clothing a philosophic doctrine, so intrinsically conciliatory as his, in a shape that excites so little sympathy and gives so much provocation. An enemy defined Comtism as Catholicism _minus_ Christianity, to which an able champion retorted by calling it Catholicism _plus_ Science. Comte's Utopia has pleased the followers of the Catholic, just as little as those of the scientific, spirit.

The priesthood.

The elaborate and minute systematization of life, proper to the religion of Humanity, is to be directed by a priesthood. The priests are to possess neither wealth nor material power; they are not to command, but to counsel; their authority is to rest on persuasion, not on force. When religion has become positive, and society industrial, then the influence of the church upon the state becomes really free and independent, which was not the case in the middle ages. The power of the priesthood rests upon special knowledge of man and nature; but to this intellectual eminence must also be added moral power and a certain greatness of character, without which force of intellect and completeness of attainment will not receive the confidence they ought to inspire. The functions of the priesthood are of this kind:--To exercise a systematic direction over education; to hold a consultative influence over all the important acts of actual life, public and private; to arbitrate in cases of practical conflict; to preach sermons recalling those principles of generality and universal harmony which our special activities dispose us to ignore; to order the due classification of society; to perform the various ceremonies appointed by the founder of the religion. The authority of the priesthood is to rest wholly on voluntary adhesion, and there is to be perfect freedom of speech and discussion. This provision hardly consists with Comte's congratulations to the tsar Nicholas on the "wise vigilance" with which he kept watch over the importation of Western books.

Women.

From his earliest manhood Comte had been powerfully impressed by the necessity of elevating the condition of women. (See remarkable passage in his letters to M. Valat, pp. 84-87.) His friendship with Madame de Vaux had deepened the impression, and in the reconstructed society women are to play a highly important part. They are to be carefully excluded from public action, but they are to do many more important things than things political. To fit them for their functions, they are to be raised above material cares, and they are to be thoroughly educated. The family, which is so important an element of the Comtist scheme of things, exists to carry the influence of woman over man to the highest point of cultivation. Through affection she purifies the activity of man. "Superior in power of affection, more able to keep both the intellectual and the active powers in continual subordination to feeling, women are formed as the natural intermediaries between Humanity and man. The Great Being confides specially to them its moral Providence, maintaining through them the direct and constant cultivation of universal affection, in the midst of all the distractions of thought or action, which are for ever withdrawing men from its influence.... Beside the uniform influence of every woman on every man, to attach him to Humanity, such is the importance and the difficulty of this ministry that each of us should be placed under the special guidance of one of these angels, to answer for him, as it were, to the Great Being. This moral guardianship may assume three types,--the mother, the wife and the daughter; each having several modifications, as shown in the concluding volume. Together they form the three simple modes of solidarity, or unity with contemporaries,--obedience, union and protection--as well as the three degrees of continuity between ages, by uniting us with the past, the present and the future. In accordance with my theory of the brain, each corresponds with one of our three altruistic instincts--veneration, attachment and benevolence."

Conclusion.

How the positive method of observation and verification of real facts has landed us in this, and much else of the same kind, is extremely hard to guess. Seriously to examine an encyclopaedic system, that touches life, society and knowledge at every point, is evidently beyond the compass of such an article as this. There is in every chapter a whole group of speculative suggestions, each of which would need a long chapter to itself to elaborate or to discuss. There is at least one biological speculation of astounding audacity, that could be examined in nothing less than a treatise. Perhaps we have said enough to show that after performing a great and real service to thought Comte almost sacrificed his claims to gratitude by the invention of a system that, as such, and independently of detached suggestions, is markedly retrograde. But the world will take what is available in Comte, while forgetting that in his work which is as irrational in one way as Hegel is in another.

See also the article POSITIVISM.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--_Works, Editions and Translations: Cours de philosophie positive_ (6 vols., Paris, 1830-1842; 2nd ed. with preface by E. Littré, Paris, 1864; 5th ed., 1893-1894; Eng. trans. Harriet Martineau, 2 vols., London, 1853; 3 vols. London and New York, 1896); _Discours sur l'esprit positif_ (Paris, 1844; Eng. trans. with explanation E. S. Beesley, 1905); _Ordre et progrès_ (ib. 1848); _Discours sur l'ensemble de positivisme_ (1848, Eng. trans. J. H. Bridges, London, 1852); _Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie_ (4 vols., Paris, 1852-1854; ed. 1898; Eng. trans. with analysis and explanatory summary by Bridges, F. Harrison, E. S. Beesley and others, 1875-1879); _Catéchisme positiviste_ (Paris, 1852; 3rd ed., 1890; Eng. trans. R. Congreve, Lond. 1858, 3rd ed., 1891); _Appel aux Conservateurs_ (Paris, 1855 and 1898); _Synthèse subjective_ (1856 and 1878); _Essai de philos. mathématique_ (Paris, 1878); P. Descours and H. Gordon Jones, _Fundamental Principles of Positive Philos._ (trans. 1905), with biog. preface by E. S. Beesley. The Letters of Comte have been published as follows:--the letters to M. Valat and J. S. Mill, in _La Critique philosophique_ (1877); correspondence with Mde. de Vaux (ib., 1884); _Correspondance inédite d'Aug. Comte_ (1903 foll.); _Lettres inédites de J. S. Mill à Aug. Comte publ. avec les résponses de Comte_ (1899).

_Criticism._--J. S. Mill, _Auguste Comte and Positivism_; J. H. Bridges' reply to Mill, _The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrines_ (1866); Herbert Spencer's essay on the _Genesis of Science_ and pamphlet on _The Classification of the Sciences_; Huxley's "Scientific Aspects of Positivism," in his _Lay Sermons_; R. Congreve, _Essays Political, Social and Religious_ (1874); J. Fiske, _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_ (1874); G. H. Lewes, _History of Philosophy_, vol. ii.; Edward Caird, _The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte_ (Glasgow, 1885); Hermann Gruber, _Aug. Comte der Begründer des Positivismus. Sein Leben und seine Lehre_ (Freiburg, 1889) and _Der Positivismus vom Tode Aug. Comtes bis auf unsere Tage, 1857-1891_ (Freib. 1891); L. Lévy-Bruhl, _La Philosophie d'Aug. Comte_ (Paris, 1900); H. D. Hutton, _Comte's Theory of Man's Future_ (1877), _Comte, the Man and the Founder_ (1891), _Comte's Life and Work_ (1892); E. de Roberty, _Aug. Comte et Herbert Spencer_ (Paris, 1894); J. Watson, _Comte, Mill and Spencer. An outline of Philos._ (1895 and 1899); Millet, _La Souveraineté d'après Aug. Comte_ (1905); L. de Montesquieu Fezensac, _Le Système politique d'Aug. Comte_ (1907); G. Dumas, _Psychologie de deux Messies positivistes_ (1905). (J. Mo.; X.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] For Comte's place in the history of ethical theory see ETHICS.

COMUS (from [Greek: kômos], revel, or a company of revellers), in the later mythology of the Greeks, the god of festive mirth. In classic mythology the personification does not exist; but Comus appears in the [Greek: Eikónes], or _Descriptions of Pictures_, of Philostratus, a writer of the 3rd century A.D. as a winged youth, slumbering in a standing attitude, his legs crossed, his countenance flushed with wine, his head--which is sunk upon his breast--crowned with dewy flowers, his left hand feebly grasping a hunting spear, his right an inverted torch. Ben Jonson introduces Comus, in his masque entitled _Pleasure reconciled to Virtue_ (1619), as the portly jovial patron of good cheer, "First father of sauce and deviser of jelly." In the _Comus, sive Phagesiposia Cimmeria; Somnium_ (1608, and at Oxford, 1634), a moral allegory by a Dutch author, Hendrik van der Putten, or Erycius Puteanus, the conception is more nearly akin to Milton's, and Comus is a being whose enticements are more disguised and delicate than those of Jonson's deity. But Milton's Comus is a creation of his own. His story is one

"Which never yet was heard in tale or song From old or modern bard, in hall or bower."

Born from the loves of Bacchus and Circe, he is "much like his father, but his mother more"--a sorcerer, like her, who gives to travellers a magic draught that changes their human face into the "brutal form of some wild beast," and, hiding from them their own foul disfigurement, makes them forget all the pure ties of life, "to roll with pleasure in a sensual sty."

COMYN, JOHN (d. c. 1300), Scottish baron, was a son of John Comyn (d. 1274), justiciar of Galloway, who was a nephew of the constable of Scotland, Alexander Comyn, earl of Buchan (d. 1289), and of the powerful and wealthy Walter Comyn, earl of Mentieth (d. 1258). With his uncle the earl of Buchan, the elder Comyn took a prominent part in the affairs of Scotland during the latter part of the 13th century, and he had interests and estates in England as well as in his native land. He fought for Henry III. at Northampton and at Lewes, and was afterwards imprisoned for a short time in London. The younger Comyn, who had inherited the lordship of Badenoch from his great-uncle the earl of Mentieth, was appointed one of the guardians of Scotland in 1286, and shared in the negotiations between Edward I. and the Scots in 1289 and 1290. When Margaret, the Maid of Norway, died in 1290, Comyn was one of the claimants for the Scottish throne, but he did not press his candidature, and like the other Comyns urged the claim of John de Baliol. After supporting Baliol in his rising against Edward I., Comyn submitted to the English king in 1296; he was sent to reside in England, but returned to Scotland shortly before his death.

Comyn's son, JOHN COMYN (d. 1306), called the "red Comyn," is more famous. Like his father he assisted Baliol in his rising against Edward I., and he was for some time a hostage in England. Having been made guardian of Scotland after the battle of Falkirk in 1298 he led the resistance to the English king for about five years, and then early in 1304 made an honourable surrender. Comyn is chiefly known for his memorable quarrel with Robert the Bruce. The origin of the dispute is uncertain. Doubtless the two regarded each other as rivals; Comyn may have refused to join in the insurrection planned by Bruce. At all events the pair met at Dumfries in January 1306; during a heated altercation charges of treachery were made, and Comyn was stabbed to death either by Bruce or by his followers.

Another member of the Comyn family who took an active part in Scottish affairs during these troubled times is JOHN COMYN, earl of Buchan (d. c. 1313). This earl, a son of Earl Alexander, was constable of Scotland, and was first an ally and then an enemy of Robert the Bruce.

CONACRE (a corruption of corn-acre), in Ireland, a system of letting land, mostly in small patches, and usually for the growth of potatoes as a kind of return instead of wages. It is now practically obsolete.

CONANT, THOMAS JEFFERSON (1802-1891), American Biblical scholar, was born at Brandon, Vermont, on the 13th of December 1802. Graduating at Middlebury College in 1823, he became tutor in the Columbian University (now George Washington University) from 1825 to 1827, professor of Greek, Latin and German at Waterville College (now Colby College) from 1827 to 1833, professor of biblical literature and criticism in Hamilton (New York) Theological Institute from 1835 to 1851, and professor of Hebrew and of Biblical exegesis in Rochester Theological Seminary from 1851 to 1857. From 1857 to 1875 he was employed by the American Bible Union on the revision of the New Testament (1871). He married in 1830 Hannah O'Brien Chaplin (1809-1865), who was herself the author of _The Earnest Man_, a biography of Adoniram Judson (1855), and of _The History of the English Bible_ (1859), besides being her husband's able assistant in his Hebrew studies. He died in Brooklyn, New York, on the 30th of April 1891. Conant was the foremost Hebrew scholar of his time in America. His treatise, _The Meaning and Use of "Baptizein" Philologically and Historically Investigated_ (1860), an "appendix to the revised version of the Gospel by Matthew," is a valuable summary of the evidence for Baptist doctrine. He translated and edited Gesenius's _Hebrew Grammar_ (1839; 1877), and published revised versions with notes of _Job_ (1856), _Genesis_ (1868), _Psalms_ (1871), _Proverbs_ (1872), _Isaiah_ i.-xiii. 22 (1874), and _Historical Books of the Old Testament, Joshua to II. Kings_ (1884).

CONATION (from Lat. _conari_, to attempt, strive), a psychological term, originally chosen by Sir William Hamilton (_Lectures on Metaphysics_, pp. 127 foll.), used generally of an attitude of mind involving a tendency to take _action_, e.g. when one decides to remove an object which is causing a painful sensation, or to try to interrupt an unpleasant train of thought. This use of the word tends to lay emphasis on the mind as self-determined in relation to external objects. Another less common use of the word is to describe the pleasant or painful sensations which accompany muscular activity; the _conative_ phenomena, thus regarded, are psychic changes brought about by external causes.

The chief difficulty in connexion with Conation is that of distinguishing it from Feeling, a term of very vague significance both in technical and in common usage. Thus the German psychologist F. Brentano holds that no real distinction can be made. He argues that the mental process from sorrow or dissatisfaction, through hope for a change and courage to act, up to the voluntary determination which issues in

## action, is a single homogeneous whole (_Psychologie_, pp. 308-309). The

mere fact, however, that the series is continuous is no ground for not distinguishing its parts; if it were so, it would be impossible to distinguish by separate names the various colours in the solar spectrum, or indeed perception from conception. A more material objection, moreover, is that, in point of fact, the feeling of pleasure or pain roused by a given stimulus is specifically different from, and indeed may not be followed by, the determination to modify or remove it. Pleasure and pain, i.e. hedonic sensation _per se_, are essentially distinct from appetition and aversion; the pleasures of hearing music or enjoying sunshine are not in general accompanied by any volitional

## activity. It is true that painful sensations are generally accompanied

by definite aversion or a tendency to take action, but the cases of positive pleasure are amply sufficient to support a distinction. Therefore, though in ordinary language such phrases as "feeling aversion" are quite legitimate, accurate psychology compels us to confine "feeling" to states of consciousness in which no conative

## activity is present, i.e. to the psychic phenomena of pleasure or pain

considered in and by themselves. The study of such phenomena is specifically described as Hedonics (Gr. [Greek: hêdonê], pleasure) or Algedonics (Gr. [Greek: algêdôn], pain); the latter term was coined by H. R. Marshall (in _Pain, Pleasure and Aesthetics_, 1894), but has not been generally used.

The problem of conation is closely related to that of Attention (q.v.), which indeed, regarded as active consciousness, implies conation (G. T. Ladd, _Psychology_, 1894, p. 213). Thus, whenever the mind deliberately focusses itself upon a particular object, there is implied a psychic effort (for the relation between Attention and Conation, see G. F. Stout, _Analytic Psychology_,