Auguste Comte was born 200 years ago today, on Moses 10th, 9, or January 19th, 1798, as you or I might call it. As a young man he became widely respected as a mathematician, but when he began to dabble in philosophy in his early thirties, his ideas became a bit eccentric. There were, according to Comte, three distinct and successive stages in the development of human thought - the "theological", the "metaphysical" and the "positive". In the first stage people seek supernatural explanations for the happenings that affect their daily lives, while in the second they adopt an abstract and more metaphysical approach when trying to explain the world. In the final stage they proceed by experiment to reach what is clearly recognisable as positive truth. So far, so good. But Comte went on to propose 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 suggested a calendar as a kind of mnemonic for this exercise. "All the relation to the moon being set aside," said Comte, "and the month becoming as subjective as the week, we soon come to see that it is necessary to make the month invariably four weeks exactly, which leads to the division of the year into 13months. The complementary day with which, on this system, each year ends, will have no weekly or monthly designation, any more than will the additional day which follows it in leap years. Their names will be derived solely from the festivals appointed for them, and in this way we secure the continuity of the Positivist Calendar, all its months beginning with a Monday and ending with a Sunday."
And so it was. Comte's Positivist Calendar, unveiled in 1849, had 13 months of four weeks each, and was arbitrarily designated to have started in 1789, making this year, 1998, the year 209 by his reckoning. The months were 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. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for those of us who find it difficult to remember dates - Comte's Positivist Calendar never quite caught on.