The daily types required for moral pur

po-es.

Supplemen

the principal modes or degrees of the phase of evolution with which they are connected, and which through them becomes clear. So complemented, the succession of the thirteen monthly types forms an adequate idealization of the whole past. The two series, as the basis of our system of commemoration, will ever be an integral part of the normal worship in the three months it devotes to history, as these sixty-five names are almost all employed in the concrete developement of the abstract festivals, as may be seen by reference to the conspectus of Sociolatry.

Important as it is to impress, by means of art, on the Western mind the general conception of the past, the main destination of the historical calendar is yet a moral one; to revive, that is, the sense of continuity everywhere in profound decay. To the children of revolution who turn to the future in contempt of the past, the priesthood of Humanity steps forward to proclaim the Great Being by the honour it pays to its best servants. Therefore it is that the concrete worship should be instituted on such a scale, that the veneration due to our ancestors may issue in devotion to our posterity. The past has been misjudged, and its pressure should at the present day be made sensible by a multiplication of individual connections, to be condensed later when continuity is firmly established. The expansion is no less desirable on another ground; it may help to overcome the selfishness of theological and the individualism of metaphysical belief, by awakening in all the noble desire of honourable incorporation with the supreme existence. For these reasons it is, that the Western commemoration should at present include daily types, always arranged in chronological order, but chosen indifferently from the precursors, rivals, and successors of the weekly type. I was thus led, from the very beginning, to make the concrete worship still more complete, by adopting for certain days secondary names, to be substituted for their principals in leap years.

It is solely in reference to these secondary names, distintary names. guished by italics in the Calendar (see below), that I have occasionally profited by the judicious observations not unfrequently made to me during the last five years, with a view to improving the Western calendar, by addition or substitution. The result of this gradual amelioration is that, as a construction, it leaves me no regret on the score of omission, though I hold

1 by the free cohesion of the five leading populations-the French, Italian,

in this Calendar. The names in Italics are those of the persons who,

myself bound to carefully examine any new proposals, provided they be not purely negative in character. I alone as yet am at the Western point of view, and I am sufficiently clear of partiality towards France to judge all distinguished names whatsoever through the veil of national illusions.

of the

worship.

A comparison of the Calendar with the preceding volume Insufficiency brings out clearly the inevitable defects of the concrete wor- concrete ship, its inability, viz., to embrace the larger portion of man's educational stage. Not only is it unable on the grounds already assigned to include Fetichism, it pays but scanty honour to the Theocracy, the highest types of the Theocracy being lost to us, in consequence of the admirable self-denial which was characteristic of the system; and the result is that I have been driven to incorporate in the first month some collective commemorations and even some purely mythical names. Throughout the remainder of the Calendar, the number of the festivals is seldom in proportion to the importance of the phase; so that a synoptical table, the main object of which is to place before us the Western transition as a whole, fails as a comparison of its principal phases. It gives three months to the intellectual movement of Greece, whilst Roman civilization is condensed into one, and half even of that concerns what is but indirectly a preparation for it. If two months are really sufficient to idealize the nine centuries of the Middle Ages, the evolution of modern times would seem not to deserve six. Of the five constituents of the Western world, the Spanish type receives but scant honour; for the superiority of Spain, admirable as it is, is a superiority in feeling, and as such cannot be adequately appreciated when we are commemorating the developement of intellect and activity. These various defects may be, it is true, in great measure, remedied by the wisdom of its interpreters, still they are inseparable from the concrete worship, and its function therefore is simply to prepare the existing generation for the abstract glorification of the past.

Calendar

and practical

services moral.

prevail over

This enumeration of the inevitable shortcomings of the In the historical calendar would be incomplete, if we omitted to re- theoretical mark that, in it, intellectual or practical services naturally are of more weight than moral desert, our object being to understand aright the developement of the powers of man at a time when the discipline of those powers was impossible. The calendar is not meant to give us examples of conduct; for

The calendar purely

such, in any large numbers, we must wait for the normal state; its purpose is to call us back from anarchy-to subordination to the past, through the honouring the individual instruments of the progress achieved by the race. Although the list should, after the transition, serve invariably in our choice of baptismal names, that is to say, when it has received its full completeness, this is a use of it which will always require the intervention of the priesthood, if we would avoid undesirable patrons. Even in classifying the intellectual types, in some instances I have been obliged to look to the results attained rather than to individual merit, such results mainly depending on their circumstances, in some cases favourable to their vocation, in others adverse. Of the six thinkers ranked under Bacon, three were in my judgment his superiors, but their superiority lacked the opportunity to evince itself by their giving as great an impulse as Bacon gave to the intellectual progress; the contrast is similar between Lagrange and Newton.

Such is the spirit in which the calendar is to be studied provisional. and taught, as a summing up the whole commemoration of the past. Though almost entirely devoted to the vast transition through which the Western world had to pass from Theocracy to Sociocracy, it may be looked upon in the present day as representing the whole initiation of mankind, the issue of which is furnished us by this transition. The instinct of continuity was not really impaired, save in these thirty centuries, and as a termination of them, Positivism recalls the Western nations, increasingly revolutionary, to the normal attitude of the Theocrats and the Fetichists, its aim being the union of the race. Putting aside the fact that the general plan of the historical calendar indicates by itself its purely provisional intention, there are details in the construction which directly announce as proximate the advent of the normal cultus; I allude to the abstract character of the two festivals with which it ends. For the last day of the year and the additional day in leap years are the same festivals as those which stand last in the Conspectus of Sociolatry.

Two pro

visions requisite to

complete the above.

So I am led on to complete my exposition by two explanations which are indispensable to a clear comparison of the transitional worship in its actual state with its previous state in former editions, that in the Positivist Catechism included.'

That is to say, in the first French edition. In the second and in the English translation it stands as in the present volume.