It is not unusual to regard Ernest Renan as the most eminent of Comte's followers, a status, however, assured to him less perhaps for his attainments as a systematic thinker than for his gifts as a writer, since as a prosateur he is among the best of his century. But if he is to be counted as a positivist it must be so with qualification. ‘I felt quite irritated’, he observes in Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, ‘at the idea of Auguste Comte being dignified with the title of a great man for having expressed in bad French what all scientific minds had done for the past two hundred years as clearly as he had done.’ I am not now concerned to assess the justice of this judgment on Comte himself, but it is surely not open to doubt that in its substance at least Renan's own philosophy is a positivism not far removed from Comte's. Where he diverges from Comte is in the tone of its presentation and in his coloration of scientific rationalism with a large infusion of Romantic idealism, though not without a significant residue of Catholic sentiment inherited from his childhood and youth. ‘I was formed’, he tells us, ‘by the Church, I owe to it what I am, and I shall never forget it.’