Part 349 (2/2)

PHILISTINE, the name given by the students in Germany to a non-university man of the middle-cla.s.s, or a man without (university) culture, or of narrow views of things.

PHILISTINES, a people, for long of uncertain origin, but now generally believed to have been originally emigrants from Crete, who settled in the plain, some 40 m. long by 15 broad, extending along the coast of Palestine from Joppa on the N. to the desert on the S., and whose chief cities were Ashdod, Askelon, Ekron, Gaza, and Gath; they were a trading and agricultural people, were again and again a thorn in the side of the Israelites, but gradually tamed into submission, so as to be virtually extinct in the days of Christ; their chief G.o.d was DAGON (q. v.).

PHILLIP, JOHN, painter, born in Aberdeen; his early pictures ill.u.s.trate Scottish subjects, his latest and best ill.u.s.trate life in Spain, whither he had gone in 1851 for his health (1817-1867).

PHILLIPS, WENDELL, slavery abolitionist and emanc.i.p.ationist generally, born at Boston, U.S., and bred to the bar; was Garrison's aide-de-camp in the cause, and chief after his death (1811-1884).

PHILO JUDaeUS (i. e. Philo the Jew), philosopher of the 1st century, born in Alexandria; studied the Greek philosophy, and found in it, particularly the teaching of Plato, the rationalist explanation of the religion of Moses, which he regarded as the revelation to which philosophy was but the key; he was a man of great learning and great influence among his people, and was in his old age one of an emba.s.sy sent by the Jews of Alexandria in A.D. 40 to Rome to protest against the imperial edict requiring the payment of divine honours to the emperor; he identified the Logos of the Platonists with the Word in the New Testament.

PHILOCRETES, a famous archer, who had been the friend and armour-bearer of Hercules who instructed him in the use of the bow, and also bequeathed his bow with the poisoned arrows to him after his death; he accompanied the Greeks to the siege of Troy, but one of the arrows fell on his foot, causing a wound the stench of which was intolerable, so that he was left behind at Lemnos, where he remained in misery 10 years, till an oracle declared that Troy could not be taken without the arrows of Hercules; he was accordingly sent for, and being healed of his wound by aesculapius, a.s.sisted at the capture of the city.

PHILOMELA, daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, and sister of Progne; she was the victim of an outrage committed by her brother-in-law Tereus, who cut out her tongue to prevent her exposing him, and kept her in close confinement; here she found means of communicating with her sister, when the two, to avenge the wrong, made away with Itys, Tereus'

son, and served him up to his father at a banquet; the fury of Tereus on the discovery knew no bounds, but they escaped his vengeance, Philomela by being changed into a nightingale and Progne into a swallow.

PHILOPOEMON, the head of the Achaecan League, born at Megalopolis, and the last of the Greek heroes; fought hard to achieve the independence of Greece, but having to struggle against heavy odds, was overpowered; rose from a sick-bed to suppress a revolt, was taken prisoner, thrown into a dungeon, and forced to drink poison (252-183 B.C.).

PHILOSOPHE, name for a philosopher of the school of 18th century Enlightenment, represented by the ENCYCLOPEDISTS (q. v.) of France; the cla.s.s have been characterised by the delight they took in outraging the religious sentiment. See AUFKLaRUNG and ILLUMINATION, THE.

PHILOSOPHER'S STONE was, with the Elixir of Life, the object of the search of the mediaeval alchemists. Their theory regarded gold as the most perfect metal, all others being removed from it by various stages of imperfection, and they sought an amalgam of pure sulphur and pure mercury, which, being more perfect still than gold, would trans.m.u.te the baser metals into the n.o.bler.

PHILOSOPHISM, FRENCH, a philosophy such as the philosophers of France gave instances of, founded on the notion and cultivated in the belief that scientific knowledge is the sovereign remedy for the ills of life, summed up in two articles--first, that ”a lie cannot be believed”; and second, that ”in spiritual supersensual matters no belief is possible,” her boast being that ”she had destroyed religion by extinguis.h.i.+ng the abomination” (_l'Infame_).

PHILOSOPHY, the science of sciences or of things in general, properly an attempt to find the absolute in the contingent, the immutable in the mutable, the universal in the particular, the eternal in the temporal, the real in the phenomenal, the ideal in the real, or in other words, to discover ”the single principle that,” as Dr. Stirling says, ”possesses within itself the capability of transition into all existent variety and varieties,” which it presupposes can be done not by induction from the transient, but by deduction from the permanent as that spiritually reveals itself in the creating mind, so that a _Philosopher_ is a man who has, as Carlyle says, quoting Goethe, ”stationed himself in the middle (between the outer and the inner, the upper and the lower), to whom the Highest has descended and the Lowest mounted up, who is the equal and kindly brother of all.” ”Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of the inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not; whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort; may still linger in the forecourt till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.” Indeed philosophy is more than SCIENCE (q. v.); it is a divine wisdom instilled into and inspiring a thinker's life. See THINKER, THE.

PHILOXENUS, a Greek poet who lived at the court of Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse; condemned to prison for refusing to praise some verses of the tyrant, he was led forth to criticise others, but returned them as worse, begging the officers who handed them to lead him back, which when the tyrant was told, he laughed and released him.

PHILPOTTS, HENRY, bishop of Exeter, born in Bridgwater, a keen Tory and uncompromising High-Churchman, the chief actor in the celebrated GORHAM CASE (q. v.), and noted for his obstinate opposition to political reform as the opening of the floodgates of democracy, which he dreaded would subvert everything that was dear to him (1778-1869).

PHILTRE, the name given to certain concoctions of herbs, often deleterious and poisonous, supposed to secure for the person administering it the love of the person to whom it was administered; these love potions were popular in the declining days of Greece and Rome, throughout mediaeval Europe, and continue to be compounded to this day in the superst.i.tious East.

PHIZ, the pseudonym of Hablot K. Browne, the ill.u.s.trator of the first edition of the ”Pickwick Papers” of d.i.c.kens.

PHLEGETHON, in the Greek mythology a river in the lower world which flowed in torrents of fire athwart it, and which scorched up everything near it.

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