ABSTRACT
The revolutionary principle consists in the breach of continuity, it devolves upon positivism at the present day to begin its social action by systematizing public commemoration, which is misapprehended by all existing schools equally. This chapter shows that the custom adopted by its predecessor, on this single point instinctively its superior, by virtue of an irresistible impulse—that predecessor, moreover, respecting the traditional arrangement of the Western year, from a presentiment of the reasons for it. The provisional and the ultimate era, then, of the Positivist Calendar must differ by two thirds of a century—a difference that facilitates our habitual comparison of the present with the future or the past. Throughout the remainder of the calendar, the number of the festivals is seldom in proportion to the importance of the phase, so that a synoptic 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.
