I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,--to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined! Yes, just as much good as it would do a man tired of sitting still in a "too easy chair" to take a long walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances, as it would be under his.
Maine's power of swiftly assimilating new ideas and appreciating modes of thought and conduct remote from modern Western life came into contact with the facts of Indian society at exactly the right time, and his colleagues and other competent observers expressed the highest opinion of his work. In return Maine brought back from his Indian office a store of knowledge which enriched all his later writings, though he took India by name for his theme only once. This essay on India was his contribution to the composite work entitled _The Reign of Queen Victoria_ (ed. T. H. Ward, 1887). Not having been separately published, it is perhaps the least known of Maine's writings; but its combination of just perception and large grasp with command of detail is not easily matched outside W. Stubbs's prefaces to some of the chronicles in the Rolls series, and (more lately) F. W. Maitland's monographs. As vice-chancellor of the university of Calcutta, Maine commented, with his usual pregnant ingenuity, on the results produced by the contact of Eastern and Western thought. Three of these addresses were published, wholly or in part, in the later editions of _Village Communities_; the substance of others is understood to be embodied in the Cambridge Rede lecture of 1875, which is to be found in the same volume. The practical side of Maine's experience was not long lost to India; he became a member of the secretary of state's council in 1871, and remained so for the rest of his life. In the same year he was gazetted a K.C.S.I. In 1869 Maine was appointed to the chair of historical and comparative jurisprudence newly founded in the university of Oxford by Corpus Christi College. Residence at Oxford was not required, and the election amounted to an invitation to the new professor to resume and continue in his own way the work he had begun in _Ancient Law_. During the succeeding years he published the principal matters of his lectures in a carefully revised literary form: _Village Communities in the East and the West_ (1871); _Early History of Institutions_ (1875); _Early Law and Custom_ (1883). In all these works the phenomena of societies in an archaic stage, whether still capable of observation or surviving in a fragmentary manner among more modern surroundings or preserved in contemporary records, are brought into line, often with singular felicity, to establish and illustrate the normal process of development in legal and political ideas. Entry: MAINE
It was in the late summer of 1796 that a dreadful calamity came upon the Lambs, which seemed to blight all Lamb's prospects in the very morning of life. On the 22nd of September his sister Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night," was suddenly seized with acute mania, in which she stabbed her mother to the heart. The calm self-mastery and loving self-renunciation which Charles Lamb, by constitution excitable, nervous and self-mistrustful, displayed at this crisis in his own history and in that of those nearest him, will ever give him an imperishable claim to the reverence and affection of all who are capable of appreciating the heroisms of common life. With the help of friends he succeeded in obtaining his sister's release from the lifelong restraint to which she would otherwise have been doomed, on the express condition that he himself should undertake the responsibility for her safe keeping. It proved no light charge: for though no one was capable of affording a more intelligent or affectionate companionship than Mary Lamb during her periods of health, there was ever present the apprehension of the recurrence of her malady; and when from time to time the premonitory symptoms had become unmistakable, there was no alternative but her removal, which took place in quietness and tears. How deeply the whole course of Lamb's domestic life must have been affected by his singular loyalty as a brother needs not to be pointed out. Entry: LAMB
3. _The Serviceable and the Non-Serviceable Arts._--It has been established from the outset that, though the essential distinction of fine art as such is to minister not to material necessity or practical use, but to delight, yet there are some among the arts of men which do both these things at once and are arts of direct use and of beauty or emotional appeal together. Under this classification a survey of the field of art at different periods of history would yield different results. In ruder times, we have seen, the utilitarian aim was still the predominant aim of art, and most of what we now call fine arts served in the beginning to fulfil the practical needs of individual and social life; and this not only among primitive or savage races. In ancient Egypt and Assyria the primary purpose of the relief-sculptures on palace and temple walls was the practical one of historical record and commemoration. Even as late as the middle ages and early Renaissance the primary business of the painter was to give instruction to the unlearned in Bible history and in the lives of the saints, and to rouse him to moods of religious and ethical exaltation. The pleasures of fine art proper among the manual-imitative group--the pleasures, namely, of producing and contemplating certain arrangements rather than others of design, proportion, pattern, colour and light and shade, and of putting forth and appreciating certain qualities of skill, truth and significance in idealized imitation,--these were, historically speaking, by-products that arose gradually in the course of practice and development. As time went on, the conscious aim of ministering to such pleasures displaced and threw into the background the utilitarian ends for which the arts had originally been practised, and the pleasures became ends in themselves. Entry: 3
MATERIALISM (from Lat. _materia_, matter), in philosophy, the theory which regards all the facts of the universe as explainable in terms of matter and motion, and in particular explains all psychical processes by physical and chemical changes in the nervous system. It is thus opposed both to natural realism and to idealism. For the natural realist stands upon the common-sense position that minds and material objects have equally effective existence; while the idealist explains matter by mind and denies that mind can be explained by matter. The various forms into which materialism may be classified correspond to the various causes which induce men to take up materialistic views. _Naïve materialism_ is due to a cause which still, perhaps, has no small power, the natural difficulty which persons who have had no philosophic training experience in observing and appreciating the importance of the immaterial facts of consciousness. The pre-Socratics may be classed as naïve materialists in this sense; though, as at that early period the contrast between matter and spirit had not been fully realized and matter was credited with properties that belong to life, it is usual to apply the term hylozoism (q.v.) to the earliest stage of Greek metaphysical theory. It is not difficult to discern the influence of naïve materialism in contemporary thinking. We see it in Huxley, and still more in Haeckel, whose materialism (which he chooses to term "monism") is evidently conditioned by ignorance of the history and present position of speculation. _Cosmological materialism_ is that form of the doctrine in which the dominant motive is the formation of a comprehensive world-scheme: the Stoics and Epicureans were cosmological materialists. In _anti-religious materialism_ the motive is hostility to established dogmas which are connected, in the Christian system especially, with certain forms of spiritual doctrine. Such a motive weighed much with Hobbes and with the French materialists of the 18th century, such as La Mettrie and d'Holbach. The cause of _medical materialism_ is the natural bias of physicians towards explaining the health and disease of mind by the health and disease of body. It has received its greatest support from the study of insanity, which is now fully recognized as conditioned by disease of the brain. To this school belong Drs Maudsley and Mercier. The highest form of the doctrine is _scientific materialism_, by which term is meant the doctrine so commonly adopted by the physicist, zoologist and biologist. Entry: MATERIALISM
Living the life of the rapidly disappearing English "squarson," and full of cultivated interests, especially in humanizing the local village mind, and investigating and recording the good things of old-time, his many-sided activities were shown in every direction and his literary facility made his work known far and wide. His familiarity with the country-side and his interest in folk-lore were of special utility in recovering and preserving for publication a large mass of English popular song, and in assisting the new English movement for studying and appreciating the old national ballad-music. Entry: BARING
The conception of Hooker in his later years, which we form from the various accessible sources, is that of a person of low stature and not immediately impressive appearance, much bent by the influence of sedentary and meditative habits, of quiet and retiring manners, and discoloured in complexion and worn and marked in feature from the hard mental toil which he had expended on his great work. There seems, however, exaggeration in Walton's statement as to the meanness of his dress; and Walton certainly misreads his character when he portrays him as a kind of ascetic mystic. Though he was unworldly and simple in his desires, and engrossed in the purpose to which he had devoted his life--the "completion of the _Polity_"--his writings indicate that he possessed a cheerful and healthy disposition, and that he was capable of discovering enjoyment in everyday pleasures, and of appreciating human life and character in a wide variety of aspects. He seems to have had a special delight in outward nature--as he expressed it, he loved "to see God's blessing spring out of his mother earth"; and he spent much of his spare time in visiting his parishioners, his deference towards them, if excessive, being yet mingled with a grave dignity which rendered unwarrantable liberties impossible. As a preacher, though singularly devoid of the qualities which win the applause of the multitude, he always excited the interest of the more intelligent, the breadth and finely balanced wisdom of his thoughts and the fascination of his composition greatly modifying the impression produced by his weak voice and ineffective manner. Partly, doubtless, on account of his dim-sightedness, he never removed his eye from his manuscript, and, according to Fuller, "he may be said to have made good music with his fiddle and stick alone, having neither pronunciation nor gesture to grace his matter." Entry: HOOKER
In the next place, vibrations must have a certain _duration_ to be perceived; and lastly, to excite a sensation of a continuous musical sound, a certain _number_ of impulses must occur in a given interval of time. The lower limit is about 30, and the upper about 30,000 vibrations per second. Below 30, the individual impulses may be observed, and above 30,000 few ears can detect any sound at all. The extreme upper limit is not more than 35,000 vibrations per second. Auditory sensations are of two kinds--noises and musical sounds. _Noises_ are caused by impulses which are not regular in intensity or duration, or are not periodic, or they may be caused by a series of musical sounds occurring instantaneously so as to produce discords, as when we place our hand at random on the keyboard of a piano. _Musical tones_ are produced by periodic and regular vibrations. In musical sounds three characters are prominent--intensity, pitch and quality. _Intensity_ depends on the amplitude of the vibration, and a greater or lesser amplitude of the vibration will cause a corresponding movement of the transmitting apparatus, and a corresponding intensity of excitation of the terminal apparatus. _Pitch_, as a sensation, depends on the length of time in which a single vibration is executed, or, in other words, the number of vibrations in a given interval of time. The ear is capable of appreciating the relative pitch or height of a sound as compared with another, although it may not ascertain precisely the absolute pitch of a sound. What we call an acute or high tone is produced by a large number of vibrations, while a grave or low tone is caused by few. The musical tones which can be used with advantage range between 40 and 4000 vibrations per second, extending thus from 6 to 7 octaves. According to E. H. Weber, practised musicians can perceive a difference of pitch amounting to only the 1/64th of a semitone, but this is far beyond average attainment. In a few individuals, and especially in early life, there may be an appreciation of absolute pitch. _Quality_ or _timbre_ (or _Klang_) is that peculiar characteristic of a musical sound by which we may identify it as proceeding from a particular instrument or from a particular human voice. It depends on the fact that many waves of sound that reach the ear are compound wave systems, built up of constituent waves, each of which is capable of exciting a sensation of a simple tone if it be singled out and reinforced by a resonator (see SOUND), and which may sometimes be heard without a resonator, after special practice and tuition. Thus it appears that the ear must have some arrangement by which it resolves every wave system, however complex, into simple pendular vibrations. When we listen to a sound of any quality we recognize that it is of a certain pitch. This depends on the number of vibrations of one tone, predominant in intensity over the others, called the fundamental or ground tone, or first partial tone. The quality, or timbre, depends on the number and intensity of other tones added to it. These are termed _harmonic_ or _partial tones_, and they are related to the first partial or fundamental tone in a very simple manner, being multiples of the fundamental tone: thus-- Entry: 4
Meanwhile differences of opinion began to occur among the leaders of progress themselves. Coalitions formed for destructive purposes are often found unable to endure the strain of constructive efforts. Such lack of cohesion might easily have been foreseen in the case of the Japanese reformers. Young men without experience of public affairs, or special education to fit them for responsible posts, found the duty suddenly imposed on them not only of devising administrative and fiscal systems universally applicable to a nation hitherto divided into a congeries of semi-independent principalities, but also of shaping the country's demeanour towards novel problems of foreign intercourse and alien civilization. So long as the heat of their assault upon the shogunate fused them into a homogeneous party they worked together successfully. But when they had to build a brand-new edifice on the ruins of a still vivid past, it was inevitable that their opinions should vary as to the nature of the materials to be employed. In this divergence of views many of the capital incidents of Japan's modern history had their origin. Of the fifty-five men whose united efforts had compassed the fall of the shogunate, five stood conspicuous above their colleagues. They were Iwakura and Sanjo, court nobles; Saigo and Okubo, samurai of Satsuma, and Kido, a samurai of Choshu. In the second rank came many men of great gifts, whose youth alone disqualified them for prominence--Ito, the constructive statesman of the Meiji era, who inspired nearly all the important measures of the time, though he did not openly figure as their originator; Inouye, who never lacked a resource or swerved from the dictates of loyalty; Okuma, a politician of subtle, versatile and vigorous intellect; Itagaki, the Rousseau of his era; and a score of others created by the extraordinary circumstances with which they had to deal. But the five first mentioned were the captains, the rest only lieutenants. Among the five, four were sincere reformers--not free, of course, from selfish motives, but truthfully bent upon promoting the interests of their country before all other aims. The fifth, Saigo Takamori, was a man in whom boundless ambition lay concealed under qualities of the noblest and most enduring type. His absolute freedom from every trace of sordidness gave currency to a belief that his aims were of the simplest; the story of his career satisfied the highest canons of the samurai; his massive physique, commanding presence and sunny aspect impressed and attracted even those who had no opportunity of admiring his life of self-sacrificing effort or appreciating the remarkable military talent he possessed. In the first part of his career, the elevation of his clan to supreme power seems to have been his sole motive, but subsequently personal ambition appears to have swayed him. To the consummation of either object the preservation of the military class was essential. By the swords of the samurai alone could a new _imperium in imperio_ be carved out. On the other hand, Saigo's colleagues in the ministry saw clearly not only that the samurai were an unwarrantable burden on the nation, but also that their continued existence after the fall of feudalism would be a menace to public peace as well as an anomaly. Therefore they took the steps already described, and followed them by a conscription law, making every adult male liable for military service without regard to his social standing. It is easy to conceive how painfully unwelcome this conscription law proved to the samurai. Many of them were not unwilling to commute their pensions, since their creed had always forbidden them to care for money. Many of them were not unwilling to abandon the habit of carrying swords, since the adoption of foreign costume rendered such a custom incongruous and inconvenient. But very few of them could readily consent to step down from their cherished position as the military class, and relinquish their traditional title to bear the whole responsibility and enjoy the whole honour of fighting their country's battles. They had supposed, not unreasonably, that service in the army and navy would be reserved exclusively for them and their sons, whereas now the commonest rustic, mechanic or tradesman would be equally eligible. Entry: IX
Meanwhile, on the 31st of May 1792 he married Mademoiselle Lemonnier, daughter of the astronomer of that name, a young and beautiful girl, whose devotion ignored disparity of years, and formed the one tie with life which Lagrange found it hard to break. He had no children by either marriage. Although specially exempted from the operation of the decree of October 1793, imposing banishment on foreign residents, he took alarm at the fate of J. S. Bailly and A. L. Lavoisier, and prepared to resume his former situation in Berlin. His design was frustrated by the establishment of and his official connexion with the École Normale, and the École Polytechnique. The former institution had an ephemeral existence; but amongst the benefits derived from the foundation of the École Polytechnique one of the greatest, it has been observed,[4] was the restoration of Lagrange to mathematics. The remembrance of his teachings was long treasured by such of his auditors--amongst whom were J. B. J. Delambre and S. F. Lacroix--as were capable of appreciating them. In expounding the principles of the differential calculus, he started, as it were, from the level of his pupils, and ascended with them by almost insensible gradations from elementary to abstruse conceptions. He seemed, not a professor amongst students, but a learner amongst learners; pauses for thought alternated with luminous exposition; invention accompanied demonstration; and thus originated his _Théorie des fonctions analytiques_ (Paris, 1797). The leading idea of this work was contained in a paper published in the _Berlin Memoirs_ for 1772.[5] Its object was the elimination of the, to some minds, unsatisfactory conception of the infinite from the metaphysics of the higher mathematics, and the substitution for the differential and integral calculus of an analogous method depending wholly on the serial development of algebraical functions. By means of this "calculus of derived functions" Lagrange hoped to give to the solution of all analytical problems the utmost "rigour of the demonstrations of the ancients";[6] but it cannot be said that the attempt was successful. The validity of his fundamental position was impaired by the absence of a well-constituted theory of series; the notation employed was inconvenient, and was abandoned by its inventor in the second edition of his _Mécanique_; while his scruples as to the admission into analytical investigations of the idea of limits or vanishing ratios have long since been laid aside as idle. Nowhere, however, were the keenness and clearness of his intellect more conspicuous than in this brilliant effort, which, if it failed in its immediate object, was highly effective in secondary results. His purely abstract mode of regarding functions, apart from any mechanical or geometrical considerations, led the way to a new and sharply characterized development of the higher analysis in the hands of A. Cauchy, C. G. Jacobi, and others.[7] The _Théorie des fonctions_ is divided into three parts, of which the first explains the general doctrine of functions, the second deals with its application to geometry, and the third with its bearings on mechanics. Entry: A
JACKSON, THOMAS JONATHAN (1824-1863), known as "Stonewall Jackson," American general, was born at Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), on the 21st of January 1824, and was descended from an Ulster family. At an early age he was left a penniless orphan, and his education was acquired in a small country school until he procured, mainly by his own energy, a nomination to the Military Academy. Lack of social graces and the deficiencies of his early education impeded him at first, but "in the end 'Old Jack,' as he was always called, with his desperate earnestness, his unflinching straightforwardness, and his high sense of honour, came to be regarded with something like affection." Such qualities he displayed not less amongst the light-hearted cadets than afterwards at the head of troops in battle. After graduating he took part, as second lieutenant in the 1st U.S. Artillery, in the Mexican War. At Vera Cruz he won the rank of first lieutenant, and for gallant conduct at Contreras and Chapultepec respectively he was brevetted captain and major, a rank which he attained with less than one year's service. During his stay in the city of Mexico his thoughts were seriously directed towards religion, and, eventually entering the Presbyterian communion, he ruled every subsequent action of his life by his faith. In 1851 he applied for and obtained a professorship at the Virginia military institute, Lexington; and here, except for a short visit to Europe, he remained for ten years, teaching natural science, the theory of gunnery and battalion drill. Though he was not a good teacher, his influence both on his pupils and on those few intimate friends for whom alone he relaxed the gravity of his manner was profound, and, little as he was known to the white inhabitants of Lexington, he was revered by the slaves, to whom he showed uniform kindness, and for whose moral instruction he worked unceasingly. As to the great question at issue in 1861, Major Jackson's ruling motive was devotion to his state, and when Virginia seceded, on the 17th of April, and the Lexington cadets were ordered to Richmond, Jackson went thither in command of the corps. His intimate friend, Governor Letcher, appreciating his gifts, sent him as a colonel of infantry to Harper's Ferry, where the first collision with the Union forces was hourly expected. In June he received the command of a brigade, and in July promotion to the rank of brigadier-general. He had well employed the short time at his disposal for training his men, and on the first field of Bull Run they won for themselves and their brigadier, by their rigid steadiness at the critical moment of the battle, the historic name of "Stonewall." Entry: JACKSON