 In the year 1826 two major events take place. First, Comte’s program was reshaped. The first System of 1822 was unfinished, and writing the remaining part was one of Comte’s priorities. But in 1826 he postponed that project for an indeterminate period. To provide a more solid base for the social science and its resulting positive polity, he decided first to go through the whole of positive knowledge again and to begin a course on positive philosophy. It should be kept in mind that the Course does not belong to Comte’s initial program and that it originally was meant as a parenthesis, or prelude, that was supposed to take a few years at most. The second major event of 1826, the famous ‘cerebral crisis’ which occurred immediately after the opening lecture of the course forced Comte to stop his public lessons; but it also had longstanding effects. Thus it is customary to say that Comte received public acknowledgement only belatedly: in 1842, with the first letter from Mill, and in 1844, with the articles of Littré in Le National. But that amounts to forgetting that in 1826 Comte was a well-known personality in the intellectual circles of Paris. Guizot and Lamennais held him in high esteem. The Course’s attendance list included prestigious names such as A. von Humboldt, Arago, Broussais or Fourier. Mill, who had visited Saint-Simon in 1820–21, was deeply impressed by the first System, which one of Comte’s pupils had introduced him to in 1829 (Mill 1963, v. 12, 34). Finally, even though Comte had broken with Saint-Simon, the general public saw him as one of the master’s most authoritative spokesmen. This earned him the somewhat peculiar animosity of the Saint-Simonians: they, with few exceptions, had the distinctive characteristic of never having personally known the one they called ‘the father’, whereas Comte had been on intimate terms with him. However, the cerebral crisis made Comte unable to take advantage of the high regard he enjoyed: he disappeared from the public scene until 1844.