power of each over his own household).  They are neither to inherit, nor to receive emolument from any of their functions, or from their writings or teachings of any description, but are to live solely on their small salaries.  This M. Comte deems necessary to the complete disinterestedness of their counsel.  To have the confidence of the masses, they must, like the masses, be poor.  Their exclusion from political and from all other practical occupations is indispensable for the same reason, and for others equally peremptory.  Those occupations are, he contends, incompatible with the habits of mind necessary to philosophers.  A practical position, either private or public, chains the mind to specialities and details, while a philosopher’s business is with general truths and connected views (vues d’ensemble).  These, again, require an habitual abstraction from details, which unfits the mind for judging well and rapidly of individual cases.  The same person cannot be both a good theorist and a good practitioner or ruler, though practitioners and rulers ought to have a solid theoretic education.  The two kinds of function must be absolutely exclusive of one another:  to attempt them both, is inconsistent with fitness for either.  But as men may mistake their vocation, up to the age of thirty-five they are allowed to change their career.

To the clergy is entrusted the theoretic or scientific instruction of youth.  The medical art also is to be in their hands, since no one is fit to be a physician who does not study and understand the whole man, moral as well as physical.  M. Comte has a contemptuous opinion of the existing race of physicians, who, he says, deserve no higher name than that of veterinaires, since they concern themselves with man only in his animal, and not in his human character.  In his last years, M. Comte (as we learn from Dr Robinet’s volume) indulged in the wildest speculations on medical science, declaring all maladies to be one and the same disease, the disturbance or destruction of “l’unite cerebrale.”  The other functions of the clergy are moral, much more than intellectual.  They are the spiritual directors, and venerated advisers, of the active or practical classes, including the political.  They are the mediators in all social differences; between the labourers, for instance, and their employers.  They are to advise and admonish on all important violations of the moral law.  Especially, it devolves on them to keep the rich and powerful to the performance of their moral duties towards their inferiors.  If private remonstrance fails, public denunciation is to follow:  in extreme cases they may proceed to the length of excommunication, which, though it only operates through opinion, yet if it carries opinion with it, may, as M. Comte complacently observes, be of such powerful efficacy, that the richest man may be driven to produce his subsistence by his own manual labour, through the impossibility of inducing any other person to work for him.  In this as in