"Time has no divisions to mark its passage," says Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain: "There is never a thunderstorm or a blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or a new year - and even when a new century begins, it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."
It is for this reason that mankind has such a plethora of calendars. The most enduring of them in this part of the world have been the Julian Calendar, in use since 46 BC, and the Gregorian Calendar, which replaced it several hundred years ago. But there are many others: Judaism has its own calendar; so, too, do the Muslims and the Hindus; and the Chinese have their quaint repeating cycle of years named after the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. The French republicans introduced what they thought was a more rational system of reckoning the date in 1792; and perhaps the most bizarre of all to retrospective eyes was the calendar proposed by Auguste Comte in the middle of the 19th century.
Comte was born on the first of Pluviose in the 6th Year of the republic - or January 19th, 1798, as you or I might call it. In his younger years he was something of a rascal. He went on, however, to be widely respected as a mathematician, and it was only when he began to dabble in philosophy in middle life that his ideas became a bit eccentric. He proposed the formal worship of a being called "Humanity" - a collective concept comprising those who had been devoted to the well-being and the progress of the human race. He composed a list of those deemed worthy of the kind of reverence given to the saints and prophets of more orthodox religions, and his calendar was intended as a kind of mnemonic for this exercise.
Comte's Calendar, unveiled in 1849, had 13 months of four weeks each, dedicated in turn to Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar, Paul of Tarsus, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes, Frederick II of Prussia, and Voltaire. Fifty-two more names were associated with the weeks, and 365 others with the individual days. The entire litany of 424 names was a compendium of gentlemanly excellence in philosophy, science, literature, statesmanship and war, while to give a sense of balance, the extra day in leap year was consecrated to the worthy and collective notion of "good women".
But the idea never quite caught on. Comte's death is remembered in the orthodox way as having occurred 140 years ago today, on September 5th, 1857.