Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/474

460 Bernard de Palissy and to Schiller, to Copernicus and to Dollond, to Otway and to Racine, to Locke and to Fréret, to Froissart and to Dalton, to Cyrus and to Penn—such a canonization! in which these selected men who are the Positivist saints for ordinary days, are headed by greater saints for Sundays; with the result that Socrates and Godfrey are thus placed on a par; that while a day is dedicated to Kepler, a week is dedicated to Gall; Tasso has a week assigned to him, and Goethe a day; Mozart presides over a week, and a day is presided over by Beethoven; a week is made sacred to Louis the Eleventh, and a day to Washington—such a canonization! under which the greatest men, giving their names to months, are so selected that Frederic the Second and St. Paul alike bear this distinction; Gutemberg and Shakespeare head adjacent months; and while Bichat gives his name to a month, Newton gives his name to a week! This, which recalls the saints' calendar of the Babylonians, among whom, as Professor Sayce shows, "each day of the year had been assigned to its particular deity or patron saint," exemplifies in but one way M. Comte's consuming passion for regulating posterity, and the colossal vanity which led him to believe that mankind would hereafter perform their daily actions as he dictated. He not only settles the hierarchy of saints who are above others to be worshiped, but he prescribes the forms of worship in minute detail. Nine sacraments are specified; prayer is to be made thrice a day; for the "daily expression of their emotions both in public and private" it is suggested that future men should use Italian; and it is a recommended "rule of worship" of the person you adore, that "a precise idea of the place, next of the seat or the attitude, and, lastly, of the dress, appropriate to each particular case," should be summoned before the mind. Add to which that in the elaborate rubric the sacred sign (replacing the sign of the cross) and derived "from our cerebral theory" (he had a phrenology of his own) consists in placing "our hand in succession on the three chief organs—those of love, order, and progress." Of banners used in "solemn processions," it is directed that "on their white side will be the holy image; on their green, the sacred formula of Positivism;"and "the symbol of our Divinity will always be a woman of the age of thirty, with her son in her arms." Nor was M. Comte's devouring desire to rule the future satisfied with thus elaborating the observances of his cult. He undertook to control the secular culture of men, as well as that culture which, I suppose, he distinguished as sacred. There is "a Positivist library for the nineteenth century," consisting of 150 volumes: the list being compiled for the purpose "of guiding the more thoughtful minds." So that M. Comte's tastes and judgments in poetry, science, history, etc., are to be the standards for future generations. And the numerous regulations of