James Hutchison Stirling (22 June 1820 – 19 March 1909) was a Scottish idealist philosopher and physician. His work The Secret of Hegel (1st edition, 1865, in 2 vols.; revised edition, 1898, in 1 vol.) gave great impetus to the study of Hegelian philosophy both in Britain and in the United States, and it was also accepted as an authoritative work on Hegel's philosophy in Germany and Italy. The book helped to create the philosophical movement known as British idealism.
. . .After receiving a large inheritance from his father's estate in 1851, Stirling left his medical practice. He then set out to learn French and German, for the purpose of being able to better understand continental philosophical trends. In pursuit of this goal, he moved his family briefly to Boulogne-sur-Mer, France (located in the current Pas-de-Calais department of the Hauts-de-France region), then to Paris for 18 months, then to St. Servan (located two miles from the ferry port of St. Malo in the Ille-et-Vilaine department of the Brittany region of France) for four and a half years, and then finally to Heidelberg, Germany. In November 1857, Stirling and his family took up residence in London (at 3 Wilton Terrace, Kensington), where they lived for about three years. After this, in 1860 Stirling returned to Edinburgh—his address there was 4 Laverockbank Road, Trinity, Edinburgh—which then became his permanent residence until the end of his life, and where he wrote on the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and many other subjects. The primary result of his comprehensive Hegel studies was his influential work The Secret of Hegel (2 vols., 1865).
One of Stirling's other major philosophical works—Philosophy and Theology (1890) (consisting of his 20 Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1889–1890)—focuses not on Hegelian philosophical topics, but on Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories.
In this interdisciplinary study of eighteenth-century England, Patricia Fara explores how natural philosophers constructed magnetism as a science, appropriating the skills and knowledge of experienced navigators. For people of this period, magnetic phenomena reverberated with the symbolism of occult mystery, sexual attraction, and universal sympathies; in this maritime nation, magnetic instruments such as navigational compasses heralded imperial expansion, commercial gain, and scientific progress. By analyzing such multiple associations, Fara reconstructs cultural interactions in the days just prior to the creation of disciplinary science. Not only does this illustrated book provide a kaleidoscopic view of a changing society, but it also portrays the emergence of public science.
Linking this rise in interest to the utility and mysteriousness of magnetism, Fara organizes her discussion into themes, including commercialization, imperialism, instruments and invention, the role of language, attitudes toward the past, and the relationship between religion and natural philosophy. Fara shows that natural philosophers, proclaiming themselves as the only true experts on magnetism, actively participated in massive transformations of English life. In their bids for public recognition as elite specialists, they engaged in controversies that resonated with religious, economic, moral, gender, and political implications. These struggles for social and scientific authority in the eighteenth century provide the background for better understanding the cultural topography of modern society.
The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry. The date of their composition cannot be exactly ascertained. Tradition, in the country where they were written, refers them to an æra of the most remote antiquity: and this tradition is supported by the spirit and strain of the poems themselves; which abound with those ideas, and paint those manners, that belong to the most early state of society. The diction too, in the original, is very obsolete; and differs widely from the style of such poems as have been written in the same language two or three centuries ago. They were certainly composed before the establishment of clanship in the northern part of Scotland, which is itself very ancient; for had clans been then formed and known, they must have made a consider-able figure in the work of a Highland Bard; whereas there is not the least mention of them in these poems. It is remarkable that there are found in them no allusions to the Christian religion or worship; indeed, few traces of religion of any kind. One circumstance seems to prove them to be coeval with the very infancy of Christianity in Scotland. In a fragment of the same poems, which the translator has seen, a Culdee or Monk is represented as desirous to take down in writing from the mouth of Oscian, who is the principal personage in several of the following fragments, his warlike atchievements and those of his family. But Oscian treats the Monk and his religion with disdain, telling him, that the deeds of such great men were subjects too high to be recorded by him, or by any of his religion: A full proof that Christianity was not as yet established in the country.Though the poems now published appear as detached pieces in this col-lection, there is ground to believe that most of them were originally epi-sodes of a greater work which related to the wars of Fingal. Concerning this hero innumerable traditions remain, to this day, in the Highlands of Scot-land. The story of Oscian, his son, is so generally known, that to describe one in whom the race of a great family ends, it has passed into a proverb; "Oscian the last of the heroes."There can be no doubt that these poems are to be ascribed to the Bards; a race of men well known to have continued throughout many ages in Ireland and the north of Scotland. Every chief or great man had in his family a Bard or poet, whose office it was to record in verse, the illustrious actions of that family. By the succession of these Bards, such poems were handed down from race to race; some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition. And tradition, in a country so free of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors, has preserved many of them in a great measure incorrupted to this day.
James Macpherson (Gaelic: Seumas MacMhuirich or Seumas Mac a' Phearsain; 27 October 1736 – 17 February 1796) was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector, and politician. He is known for the Ossian cycle of epic poems, which he claimed to have discovered and translated from Gaelic.
. . .Macpherson's reputation as an "laborious and able writer" led to his enrolment as a political pamphleteer, satirist and newspaper columnist in support of the Grafton ministry and the succeeding administration of Lord North, in exchange for the promise of a pension-for-life. This was paid clandestinely, because he (together with his brother James) used as may as forty aliases in their writings, to suggest that the views they expressed were popular and widespread. Under his own name he defended government policy in the north American colonies (The Rights of Great Britain Asserted Against the Claims of America of 1776) and he denounced the East India Company at a time when government policy was seeking to limit the organisation's power (The History and Management of the East India Company of 1799).
Charles Gore (22 January 1853 – 17 January 1932) was a Church of England bishop, first of Worcester, then Birmingham, and finally of Oxford. He was one of the most influential Anglican theologians of the 19th century, helping reconcile the church to some aspects of biblical criticism and scientific discovery, while remaining Catholic in his interpretation of the faith and sacraments. Also known for his social action, Gore became an Anglican bishop and founded the monastic Community of the Resurrection as well as co-founded the Christian Social Union. He was the chaplain to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII.
. . .Gore was a bundle of contradictions, an Anglo-Catholic in the Church of England whose questioning of the Old Testament produced in the 1890s a crisis for many believers. In the judgment of his biographer, Gore was a loner who thought he had a vocation to community life. He chose to be buried at Mirfield, in the church of the Community of the Resurrection, though he had never managed to be more than a visitor there.
Gore died on 17 January 1932 in Kensington, London. He left instructions for his body to be cremated, a practice seen by some at the time as unacceptable for a Christian. Nearly three decades earlier, in a letter read at the 1903 opening ceremony of the Birmingham Crematorium, Gore had written:
What I should desire when I myself die is that my body should be reduced rapidly to ashes, so that it may do no harm to the living, and then in accordance with Christian feeling be laid in the earth.Gore's wishes provoked the Anglo-Catholic leader and politician Lord Halifax to exclaim, belatedly, "I could shake the life out of him with my own hands." The ashes were taken to Mirfield in Yorkshire for burial. His cope and mitre remain at the Grosvenor Chapel.
An excerpt from, "Leo The Great" (Pg. 7 - 10, via Archive.org)
Leo was born into perhaps the most important period of transition in the world's history, that stormy period which links the ancient and the modern world: the civilization of Rome and the civilization of Christendom. The great empire of Rome, which for four centuries had been almost conterminous with the known world, which seemed irresistible by the mere force of its name, and which in a condition of profound peace had been obliterating national distinctions, and uniting races the most opposite and the most remote in the bonds of commerce and a common government, was now being threatened, over-whelmed and dismembered in all directions by the barbarian hosts.
One by one the Imperial government was sur-rendering the provinces of the Empire, either to be occupied by the invading hordes, or to maintain for a time, like Britain and Armorica, a precarious independence; meanwhile the unity of the govern-ment had been finally surrendered by the separation of the Eastern and Western Empires at the death of Theodosius the Great, and the Imperial residence in the West, which had been removed for purposes of convenience at the beginning of the fourth century from Rome to Milan, was transferred by Honorius, from motives of cowardice, to Ravenna, a city which art had done its best to fortify, and which nature had rendered almost inaccessible by surrounding it with impassable morasses. Here, out of the reach of danger, and remote from any natural centre of administration, was exercised in the future what shadow of authority still remained in the hands of the Emperor of the West.
For if the Empire was becoming contemptible, that contempt centred in the emperor. That supreme position, perhaps the most magnificent that it ever fell to the lot of man to fill, and which had in fact during the four centuries of the Roman Empire, from Julius to Theodosius, been filled by no inconsiderable proportion of the greatest of the world's rulers, that position, which in pagan days had raised its occupant at once to the level of the gods, and still assigned to him a superstitious and unbounded veneration, was for nearly thirty years (A.D. 395-423) filled by Honorius, a man of whom it is related 3 (and the story must at any rate represent the estimate which his subjects formed of his character) that he was alarmed to hear of the loss of Rome, till he learned that it was not a favourite chicken of that name that was lost, but only the eternal city.
While the emperor was thus sunk in contemptible indolence the nobility of Rome seem as a class to have been not much more worthy of respect. The historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who died about the time of Leo's birth, gives us an excellent picture of their character and manners. They were extremely wealthy, extremely luxurious, extremely indolent, and extremely frivolous. They delighted in little but vanity and display. At the same time to degrading vices they added a gross superstition, often to be found among those who were sceptics or even atheists.
Meanwhile the plebeian population of Rome was a congeries of all the nations of the earth, drawn to Rome by the various attractions of the metropolis, the circus, and, above all, the enormous largess of provisions of various kinds which it was the pleasure of the emperors to lavish upon the populace of the capital.
Enough will have been said to show that neither in the emperor, nor nobility, nor plebeians of the capital were to be found the elements of social cohesion, solidity, or resistance, nor would it seem that much could be looked for from the diminished and still constantly dwindling population of the provinces.
Salvian, a priest of Marseilles and a contemporary of Leo, gives us a terrible picture of the morality of the Roman Empire of his day. His work, " On the Government of God," is a vindication of the ways of God to man, in abandoning the Roman Empire to the barbarians : the Christian world to the pagans and the Arians. It is the punishment of sins. " Among the chaste barbarians we alone are unchaste : " the moral purity of Vandal and Goth contrasts in all directions, in Germany, in Africa, in Spain, with the universal dissoluteness of the Romans.
To complete the picture we must add that almost the whole strength of the army of that date, such as it was, was to be found in the barbarians who had recruited its ranks.
At the time of the invasion of Alaric, though the troops were recalled from the provinces, even as far as Britain, to the defence of Italy, it was found impossible to raise an army composed of Roman legions without the assistance of Alani : and a few years later not only the assistance of Alani, Huns and Goths, but the recall of provincial legions and compulsory levies of new troops were necessary to enable Stilicho to raise a small army to oppose Rhodogast, but he was actually compelled to offer bribes to any slaves who would enlist.
Amidst all these elements of weakness and decay, into this last epoch of the Roman Empire Leo was born.
