A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN1

EVEN those competent students who thought most ill of Comte's attempt to transform his philosophy into a religion, have agreed to praise the Positivist Calendar. This remarkable list of between five and six hundred worthies of all ages and nations, classified under thirteen main heads, from Theocratic Civilisation down to Modern Science and Modern Industry, was drawn up with the design of substituting for the saints of the Catholic Calendar the men whose work marks them out in history as leaders and benefactors in the gradual development of the human race. On Comte's effort to erect a new polity and a new religion, with himself as its high priest and pontiff, nobody has brought to bear, I will not say merely so much hostile criticism, but such downright indignation, as John Stuart Mill. His pages on the later speculations of Comte are the only instance in all his works in which he treats a philosopher from whom he differs with the bitterness felt by the ordinary carnal man for the perversities of an opponent, or, what are more provoking still, the aberrations of a friend. Yet Mill has little but praise for the profound and comprehensive survey of the past progress of human society which is the basis of the Calendar, and guides its author's choice of the names to which we are to dedicate the days of the secular year. "While Comte sets forth,'

says Mill,

"the

1 The New Calendar of Great Men. Edited by Frederic Harrison. London: Macmillan & Co.

historical succession of systems of belief and forms of political society, and places in the strongest light those imperfections in each which make it impossible that any of them should be final, this does not make him for a moment unjust to the men or to the opinions of the past. He accords with generous recognition the gratitude due to all who, with whatever imperfections of doctrine or even of conduct, contributed materially to the work of human improvement. . . His list of heroes and benefactors of mankind includes not only every important name in the scientific movement, from Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and Blainville the biologist, and, in the aesthetic, from Homer to Manzoni, but the most illustrious names in the annals of the various religions and philosophies, and the really great politicians in all states of society. Above all, he has the most profound admiration for the services rendered by Christianity and by the Church of the Middle Ages. A more comprehensive, and, in the primitive sense of the term, more catholic sympathy and reverence towards real worth and every kind of service to humanity, we have not met with in any thinker. Men who would have torn each other to pieces, who even tried to do so, if each usefully served in his own way the interests of mankind, are all hallowed to Comte.

"Neither is his a cramped and contracted notion of human excellence, which cares only for certain forms of development. He not only personally appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the creations of poets and artists in all departments, deeming them, by their mixed appeal to the sentiments and the understanding, admirably fitted to educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the intellectual horizon of the people of the world."

An even weightier judgment than Mill's upon

says,

66

such a question is that of Littré. For Littré, while inferior to Mill in speculative power, as well as in taste and aptitude for actual affairs as they go past us, both travelled more widely over vast fields of human knowledge, and possessed in important departments of it a closer and more special acquaintance with detail. Littré, like Mill, at a critical moment in the growth of his opinions, and about the same time of life, conceived an ardent admiration for Comte's exposition of the positive philosophy, and he became, and remained to the end, its firm adherent. "Employed," he upon very different subjects history, language, physiology, medicine, erudition-I constantly used it as a sort of instrument to trace out for me the lineaments, the origin, and the outcome of each question. It suffices for all, it never misleads, it always enlightens." Like Mill-though less provoked than Mill by Comte's arrogance, his pontifical airs, and his hatred of Liberty-Littré rejected utterly and without qualification the later speculations, in which he held Comte to have thrown overboard the method and the principles on which he had built up the system of positive philosophy. Yet Littré declares that the Positivist Calendar deserves a place in the library of everybody who studies history; though we may discuss this admission or that exclusion, yet we must admire the sureness of judgment applied to so many men and over such diversity of matter; finally, it is a powerful means of developing the historic spirit and the sentiment of continuity; it is a luminous manual of meditation and instruction.

The English disciples of Comte have rendered good service to literature and to knowledge by introducing to public attention a performance so commended by such authorities. They have taken their teacher's elaborate list of those who have played an effective part in Western civilisation, and

they have clothed each of these five hundred and fifty-eight names with an apparel of biographical and historical fact, which informs the reader who they were, and what is their title to a place in a great concrete picture of human evolution. If the Calendar itself be worth anything, this illustration of the Calendar was well worth supplying. If, as Littré promises, the picture itself is to quicken meditation and to serve for instruction, then this explanation of each figure in the picture is an indispensable guide, commentary, and handbook. Mr. Harrison tells us with lucidity and precision in his preface what it is that he and his companions have done. The book is not a dictionary, for the names are placed, not in alphabetical order, but in historic sequence. They are selected again not with a view to the space they fill in common fame or in literary discussion, but in relation to a definite principle of grouping-namely, the contribution made by the given individual to the progress of mankind. These little biographies constitute, like the skeleton Calendar on which they are built up, a balanced whole, constructed, with immense care, to mark the relative importance of different movements, races, and ages.

How much diligent and conscientious trouble must have been taken, can only be realised by those who are practised in literary workmanship. Condensation is the hardest of all the requirements of composition of this kind; and these lives are marvels of condensation. Let anybody try to write about Fénelon or the Architects of the Middle Ages in a single small page; or Mozart, or Roger Bacon, or Bossuet, or Saint Louis in two; or Descartes in three; or Julius Caesar or Pope Hildebrand in four; or Aristotle in five: he will then be able to measure the industry, perspicacity, discrimination, and let us not forget also the self-denial and self-control, which have gone to the production

of these vignettes. The writers make no attempt at literary display, though at least three of them are masters of the arts of style and expression. Some of them may seem to share the just regret expressed by a great historian, that history cannot be treated apart from literature and style, like geometry or chemistry; still as a whole the writing is excellent. The merit could not be expected to be absolutely equal in a team of fifteen; but one can only admire the skill and success with which the unity of the central idea has been preserved, and a real, not a mechanical, harmony attained in bringing into a single fabric under one roof the shrines of the great servants of mankind in science and in philosophy; in painting, sculpture, music, romance, history; lyric, elegiac, and dramatic poetry; in government and religion. The field is enormous ; so is the number of individual facts, names, dates, in all languages and all branches; so is the quantity of separate estimates, appreciations, verdicts, and judgments. It is not too much to say-so far as a critic like myself can judge-that a high level of general competency has been attained, though, of course, in a survey of this encyclopaedic magnitude, there are a thousand points for remark, deduction, and objection. In one respect everybody will concur. Even those who are most ready to find Positivism as a creed hard, frigid, repulsive, and untrue, will still recognise and admire the genuine and devoted enthusiasm for purity, nobility, beauty, in art, literature, character, life, and service, that has inspired the present enterprise and marks every page of it.

Nobody must suppose that the book is to be skimmed, or merely dipped into, or even once read through and then dismissed. It is extremely readable, for that matter, but it demands and is intended for digestion and rumination. Two of the most important principles that are now established