The name of Auguste Comte, unlike that of Lamennais, does not immediately invoke the spirit of romanticism. The founder of positivism and the creator, for such he may be said to have been, of the scientific discipline of sociology – its hybrid name was certainly his invention – would appear to have drawn no inspiration whatever from the soaring flights, poetic or philosophic, of the Romantic imagination. Rather would he have conceived himself to be, on that very account, a deliberate anti-Romantic. Nevertheless the romanticist elements in his thought are by no means difficult to trace, whether in his consistent drive towards ‘wholeness’ of view, in his overweening sense of personal mission, in his dedication to ‘Humanity’ to the point of its becoming for him the divinity of a new religious cult, in his quasi-mystical obsession with the ‘eternal feminine’ – symbolized by the adored Clotilde de Vaux – in his sentimental idealism, which grew upon him as the years passed, even in his tendency to mental instability, all of which are more reminiscent of romanticist ardours than of the hard-headed scientisme of a later generation of positivists, however much indebted these were to one whose declared purpose was both ‘to organize our scientific conceptions and to systematize the art of social life’.