P. Austin Nuttall

“ The many roads, railways, canals, and rivers which converge on Paris have made it the most important trading centre in France, and the concourse of wealthy men of all nations has given it a high place in the financial world. It is a manufacturing city, producing jewellery, ornamental furniture, and all sorts of artistic "articles de Paris." The centre of French, and indeed European, fashion, it is noted for its pleasure and gaiety. The concentration of Government makes it the abode of countless officials. ”

“ Fall, The, the first transgression of divine law on the part of man, conceived of as involving the whole human race in the guilt of it, and represented as consisting in the wilful partaking of the fruit of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of both good and evil. The story of the Fall in Genesis has in later times been regarded as a spiritual allegory, and simply the Hebrew attempt, one amongst many, to explain the origin of evil. ”

“ Realism, as opposed to Nominalism, is the belief that general terms denote real things and are not mere names or answerable to the mere conception of them, and as opposed to idealism, is in philosophy the belief that we have an immediate cognition of things external to us, and that they are as they seem. In art and literature it is the tendency to conceive and represent things as they are, however unsightly and immoral they may be, without any respect to the beautiful, the true, or the good. In Ruskin's teaching mere realism is not art ”

“ Rational Horizon, a great circle parallel to the horizon, the centre of which is the centre of the earth.
Rationalism, Modern, a speculative point of view that resolves the supernatural into the natural, inspiration into observation, and revelation into what its adherents called reason, when they mean simply understanding, and which ends in stripping us naked, and leaving us empty of all the spiritual wealth accumulated by the wise in past ages, and bequeathed to us as an inheritance that had cost them their life's blood. ”

“ Nominalism, the name given to the theory of those among the Scholastics who maintained that general notions, which we denote by general terms, are only names, empty conceptions without reality, that there was no such thing as pure thought, only conception and sensuous perception, whereas realists, after Plato, held by the objective reality of universals. And, indeed, it is not as modern philosophy affirms, in the particular or the individual, in which alone, according to the Nominalists, reality resides, but in the universal, in regard to which the particular is nothing if it does not refer. ”

“ Paul the gospel of Faith, and their gospel required three things: "to work without money and be poor, to work without pleasure and be chaste, and to work according to orders and be obedient"; these were the rules they were sworn to obey at first, but they gradually forsook the austerity they enjoined, acquired great wealth, instituted a highly sensuous ceremonial, and became invested with privileges which excited the jealousy of the regular clergy; with the order were associated a number of men eminent in the Church, and many no less so in philosophy, literature, and art. ”

“ Of the five inhabited islands Hawaii is the largest; it contains the famous volcano, Kilauea, whose crater is one of the world's wonders, being 9 m. in circumference, and filled with a glowing lake of molten lava which ebbs and flows like an ocean tide. The island of Maui has the largest crater on the earth. The climate of the group is excellent, and vegetation (including forests) is abundant; sugar and rice are the chief crops. Honolulu (on Oahu) , with a splendid harbour, is the capital. The islands are now under the jurisdiction of the United States. ”

“ Renaissance, the name given to the revolution in literature and art in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, caused by the revival of the study of ancient models in the literature and art of Greece and Rome, especially the former, and to the awakening in the cultured classes of the free and broad humanity that inspired them, an epoch which marks the transition from the rigid formality of mediæval to the enlightened freedom of modern times. ”

“ Claude Lorraine, a great landscape painter, born in Lorraine, of poor parents, and apprenticed to a pastry-cook; went as such to Rome; became servant and colour-grinder to Tassi, who instructed him in his art; by assiduous study of nature in all her aspects attained to fame; was eminent in his treatment of aërial perspective, and an artist whom it was Turner's ambition to rival; he was eminent as an etcher as well as a painter; Turner left one of his finest works to the English nation on condition that it should hang side by side of a masterpiece of Claude, which it now does ”

“ Ragnarök, in the Norse mythology the twilight of the gods, when it was predicted "the Divine powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial victory by the former, should meet at last in universal, world-embracing wrestle and duel, strength against strength, mutually extinctive, and ruin, 'twilight' sinking into darkness, shall swallow up the whole created universe, the old universe of the Norse gods" ”

“ Reformation, the great event in the history of Europe in the 16th century, characterised as a revolt of light against darkness, on the acceptance or the rejection of which has since depended the destiny for good or evil of the several States composing it, the challenge to each of them being the crucial one, whether they deserved and were fated to continue or perish, and the crucial character of which is visible to-day in the actual conditions of the nations as they said "nay" to it or "yea," the challenge to each at bottom being, is there any truth in you or is there none? ”

“ The epoch thus created was the emancipation of the human being from dependent childhood to self-dependent manhood, and it constituted the first epoch in the self-conscious history, which is the history proper, of the human race. The idea the Persians formed of the principle of good came far short of the reality indeed, but they first saw that it was of purely illuminating quality and universal, and that the destiny of man was to relate himself to it, to know, worship, and obey it. ”

“ Despite its restricted arable area and lack of minerals the country has attained a high pitch of prosperity through the thrift and energy of its people, who have skilfully utilised the inexhaustible motive-power of innumerable waterfalls and mountain streams to drive great factories of silks, cottons, watches, and jewellery. The beauty of its mountain, lake, and river scenery has long made Switzerland the sanatorium and recreation ground of Europe; more than 500 health resorts exist, and the country has been described as one vast hotel. ”

“ London is also a grand emporium of commerce, and the banking centre of the world. It has nine principal docks; its shipping trade is unrivalled, 55,000 vessels enter and clear annually; it pays more than half the custom duties of the kingdom, and handles more than a quarter of the total exports; its warehouse trade is second only to that of Manchester; it manufactures everything, chiefly watches, jewellery, leather goods, cycles, pianos, and glass. The control of traffic, the lighting, and water-supply of so large a city are causing yearly more serious problems. ”

“ Titian, Vecellio, great Italian painter, born at Capo del Cadore, the prince of colourists and head of the Venetian school; studied at Venice, and came under the influence of Giorgione; he was a master of his art from the very first, and his fame led to employment in all directions over Italy, Germany, and Spain; his works were numerous, and rich in variety; he was much in request as a portrait-painter, and he painted most of the great people he knew; he ranks with Michael Angelo and Raphael as the head of the Italian renaissance; lived to a great age (1477-1576) . ”

“ Mephistopheles, the impersonation in Goethe's "Faust" of the modern devil, the incarnation of the spirit of universal scepticism and scoffing, who can see not only no beauty in goodness but no deforming in iniquity, alike without reverence for God and fear of his adversary, blind as a mole to all worth and all unworth throughout the universe, yet knowing and boastful of knowledge, by means of which he sees only "the ridiculous, the unsuitable, the bad, but for the solemn, the noble, the worthy is blind as his ancient mother." ”

“ Spiritual, The, the fruit of the quickening and abiding action of a higher principle at the centre of the being, operating so as to suffuse the whole of it, pervade the whole of it, to its utmost limits, which, seating itself in the heart of the thoughts and affections, works and weaves itself into all the life tissues and becomes part and parcel of the very flesh and blood. ”

“ Confucius, the Latin form of the name of the great sage of China, Kung Futsze, and the founder of a religion which is based on the worship and practice of morality as exemplified in the lives and teachings of the wise men who have gone before, and who, as he conceived, have made the world what it is, and have left it to posterity to build upon the same basis; while he lived he was held in greater and greater honour by multitudes of disciples, till on his death he became an object of worship, and even his descendants came to be regarded as a kind of sacred caste ”

“ Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, born in Athens; had many impediments to overcome to succeed in the profession, but by ingenious methods and indomitable perseverance he subdued them all, and became the first orator not of Greece only, but of all antiquity; a stammer in his speech he overcame by practising with pebbles in his mouth, and a natural diffidence by declaiming on the sea-beach amid the noise of the waves; while he acquired a perfect mastery of the Greek language by binding himself down to copy five times over in succession Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" ”

“ Eclectics, so-called philosophers who attach themselves to no system, but select what, in their judgment, is true out of others. In antiquity the Eclectic philosophy is that which sought to unite into a coherent whole the doctrines of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, such as that of Plotinus and Proclus was. There is an eclecticism in art as well as philosophy, and the term is applied to an Italian school which aimed at uniting the excellencies of individual great masters. ”

“ Buddhism, the religion of Buddha, a religion which, eschewing all speculation about God and the universe, set itself solely to the work of salvation, the end of which was the merging of the individual in the unity of being, and the "way" to which was the mortification of all private passion and desire which mortification, when finished, was the Buddhist Nirvâna. This is the primary doctrine of the Buddhist faith, which erelong became a formality, as all faiths of the kind, or of this high order, ever tend to do. ”

“ The tactless oppression of the Emperor Ferdinand again fanned into flame the fires of rebellion; Swedish armies now came to the assistance of the Protestants, and under Gustavus Adolphus waged successful war against the emperor, but the death of Gustavus at Lützen (1632) turned the tide in favour of the imperial forces; the German Protestant prince made a disadvantageous peace in 1635, but Sweden, now joined by France, continued the struggle against the Austrian empire. ”

“ It is in delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great.... The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face, but its inmost heart, its generic secret; it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it.... It is a perfectly level mirror we have here; no twisted, poor convex-concave mirror reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities, that is to say, withal a man justly related to all things and men, a good man.... ”

“ In short, it becomes more and more a necessity of modern life to know something of everything. A little knowledge is not dangerous to those who recognise it to be little, and it may be sufficient to enable those who possess it to understand and enjoy intelligently what would otherwise only weigh as a burdensome reflection upon their ignorance. Even a comparatively exhaustive treatment of the multitudinous subjects comprehended under the term universal knowledge would demand a library of large volumes, hence the extent and heavy cost of the great Encyclopædias. ”

“ When the winds waken, and lift and winnow the immensity of sand, the air itself is a dim sand-air, and dim looming through it, the wonderfullest uncertain colonnades of sand-pillars whirl from this side and from that, like so many spinning dervishes, of a hundred feet of stature, and dance their huge Desert waltz there. ”