One of the foremost figures of Western intellectual thought in the late 19th century, John Stuart Mill offered up examinations of human rights, personal and societal rights and responsibilities, and the striving for individual happiness that continue to impact our philosophies, both private and political, to this day. This concise but explosive essay is perhaps the best example of how far-reaching-and necessary on an ongoing basis-his thinking was. In this 1865 work, Mill discusses the rational "religion" of French philosopher and social scientist Auguste Comte, reviewing his fellow thinker's great treatise on human behavior as knowable, quantifiable, and correctable from both positive and negative angles, "endeavouring to sever," the author writes, "what in our estimation is true, from the much less which is erroneous." English philosopher and politician JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873) served as an administrator in the East Indian Company from 1823 to 1858, and as a member of parliament from 1865 to 1868. Among his essays on a wide range of political and social thought are Principles of Political Economy (1848), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869

Insofar as John Stuart Mill's two essays on Auguste Comte have any interest at all, it pertains to their author rather than their subject. From a modern perspective Mill is surprisingly enthusiastic about Comte's naive attempt to systematize all of science under a few simple headlines. In their own way these essays reveal a scientific optimism which must have been current among educated men in the 19th century. As it turned out, the book of science wasn't so near its completion after all.

Mill isn't very specific about the purpose of these essays, but I took the first one to be a defense of Comte's positivism against common objections. For a modern reader the problem is that the positivist ideal, which Mill so eloquently defends, lost all credibility in the century after this essay was written, so it now holds interest only as a record in the history of scientific thought. As for the second essay, I'm not sure why Mill took the trouble of discussing Comte's descent into "rational religion", totalitarian political ideas and numerological fantasies in such detail, only to conclude that none of it really makes any sense. Perhaps he felt the need to draw a clear line between Comte's two phases, to better preserve the earlier one.