Part 328 (1/2)
OBEID (35), in the Eastern Soudan, 220 m. SW. of Khartoum, is the capital of Kordofan; was the scene in November 1883 of the annihilation by the forces of the Mahdi, after three days' fighting, of an Egyptian army under Hicks Pasha and other English officers; its trade consists of ivory, gold, feathers, and gum.
OBELISK, a tall four-sided pillar, generally monolithic, tapering to a pyramidal pointed top, erected in connection with temples in Egypt, and inscribed all over with hieroglyphs, and in memorial, as is likely, of some historical personage or event; they are of ancient date.
OBER-AMMERGAU, a small village in Bavaria, 45 m. SW. of Munich; famed for the Pa.s.sion Play performed there by the peasants, some 500 in number, every ten years, which attracts a great many spectators to the spot; the play was inst.i.tuted in 1634 in token of grat.i.tude for the abatement of a plague.
OBERLIN, JEAN FRIEDRICH, a benevolent Protestant pastor, born at Strasburg; laboured all his life at Ban de la Roche, a wild mountain district of Alsace, and devoted himself with untiring zeal to the spiritual and material welfare of the people, which they rewarded with their pious grat.i.tude and warmest affection.
OBERON, the king of the fairies, and the husband of t.i.tania.
OBI, a river and, with its tributaries, great water highway of West Siberia, which rises in the Altai Mountains, and after a course of 2120 m. falls into the Arctic Ocean.
OBJECTIVE, a philosophical term used to denote that which is true universally apart from all merely private sense or judgment, and finds response in the universal reason, the reason that is common to all rational beings; it is opposed to subjective, or agreeable to one's mere feelings or fancy.
OBLATES, the name given to an organisation of secular priests living in community, founded by St. Charles Borromeo at the end of the 16th century, and who are ready to render any services the bishop may require of them.
OBOE, a treble-sounding musical instrument of the reed cla.s.s, to which the ba.s.soon is reckoned the ba.s.s.
OBELUS, a small coin worth about a penny, according to a custom among the Greeks placed in the mouth of a corpse at burial to pay to Charon to ferry the ghost of it over the Styx.
O'BRIEN, WILLIAM, journalist, and a Nationalist ex-M.P. for Cork; was twice over imprisoned for political offences; had to retire in 1895; _b_. 1852.
O'BRIEN, WILLIAM SMITH, Irish patriot; entered Parliament in 1826; sat for Limerick from 1835 to 1843, when he joined the Repeal a.s.sociation under O'Connell, but separated from it; joined the physical force Young Ireland party, and became the head; attempted an insurrection, which failed, and involved him in prosecution for treason and banishment for life; a free pardon was afterwards granted on promise of abstaining from all further disloyalty; he died at Bangor, in North Wales (1803-1864).
OBSCURANTIST, name given to an opponent to modern enlightenment as professed by the devotees of modern science and philosophy.
OBSIDIAN, a hard, dark-coloured rock of a gla.s.sy structure found in lava, which breaks with conchoidal fracture.
OCCAM or OAKHAM, WILLIAM OF, an English Scholastic philosopher, born at Oakham, Surrey, surnamed _Doctor Invincibilis_; was a monk of the order of St. Francis; studied under DUNS SCOTUS (q. v.), and became his rival, and a reviver of NOMINALISM (q. v.) in opposition to him, by his insistence on which he undermined the whole structure of Scholastic dogmatism, that is, its objective validity, and plunged it in hopeless ruin, but cleared the way for modern speculation, and its grounding of the OBJECTIVE (q. v.) on a surer basis (1280-1347).
OCCASIONALISM, the doctrine that the action of the spiritual organisation on the material, and of the material on the spiritual, or of the inner on the outer, and the outer on the inner, is due to the divine interposition taking occasion of the effort of mind, or of the inner, on the one hand, and the effort of matter, or the outer, on the other, to work the effect or result; or that the link connecting cause and effect in both cases, that is, the acion of the outer world on the inner, and _vice versa_, is G.o.d.
OCEANIA, an imaginary commonwealth described by James Harrington (1611-1697) in which the project of a doctrinaire republic is worked out; also a book of Froude's on the English colonies.
OCEANIA, the name given to the cl.u.s.ters of islands, consisting of Australasia in the S., Malaysia in the E. Indian Archipelago, and Polynesia in the N. and E. of the Pacific.