Part 370 (1/2)

REAL, an old Spanish silver coin still in use in Spain, Mexico, and some other of the old Spanish colonies, also is a money of account in Portugal; equals one-fourth of the _peseta_, and varies in value from 2 d. to 5d. with the rise and fall of exchange.

REAL, a legal term in English law applied to property of a permanent or immovable kind, e. g. land, to distinguish it from _personal_ or movable property.

REAL PRESENCE, the a.s.sumed presence, really and substantially, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist of the body and blood, the soul and divinity, of Christ, a doctrine of the Romish and certain other Churches.

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; according to him art is concerned with the rendering and portrayal of ideals.

REALM, ESTATES OF THE, the Sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons in Great Britain.

REAL-SCHULE, a German school in which languages, sciences, and arts are taught to qualify for apprentices.h.i.+p in some special business or craft.

REASON, in philosophy is more than mere understanding or reasoning power; it is the const.i.tutive and regulative soul of the universe a.s.sumed to live and breathe in the inner life or soul of man, as that develops itself in the creations of human genius working in accord with and revealing the deep purpose of the Maker.

REASON, in German _Vernunft_, defined by Dr. Stirling ”the faculty that unites and brings together, as against the understanding,” in German _Verstand_, ”the faculty that separates, and only in separation knows,”

and that is synthetic of the whole, whereof the latter is merely a.n.a.lytic of the parts, sundered from the whole, and without idea of the whole, the former being the faculty which construes the diversity of the universe into a unity or the one, whereas the latter dissolves the unity into diversity or the many.

REASON, G.o.dDESS OF, a Mrs. Momoro, wife of a bookseller in Paris, who, on the 10th November 1793, in the church of Notre Dame, represented what was called Reason, but was only scientific a.n.a.lysis, which the revolutionaries of France proposed, through her representing such, to install as an object of wors.h.i.+p to the dethronement of the Church, _l'infame_.

ReAUMUR, French scientist, born in La Roch.e.l.le; made valuable researches and discoveries in the industrial arts as well as in natural history; is best known as the inventor of the thermometer that bears his name, which is graduated into 80 degrees from the temperature of melting ice to that of boiling water (1683-1757).

REBECCA THE JEWESS, a high-souled Hebrew maiden, who is the heroine in Sir Walter Scott's ”Ivanhoe.”

REBECCAITES, a band of Welsh rioters who in 1843, dressed as females, went about at nights and destroyed the toll-gates, which were outrageously numerous; they took their name from Gen. xxiv. 60.

REBELLION, name of two risings of Jacobites in Scotland to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty to the throne, one in behalf of the Pretender in 1715, headed by the Earl of Mar, and defeated at Sheriffmuir, and the other in behalf of the Young Chevalier, and defeated at Culloden in April 1746.

ReCAMIR, MADAME, Frenchwoman, born at Lyons; became at 15 the wife of a rich banker In Paris thrice her own age; was celebrated for her wit her beauty, and her salon; was a friend of Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand, whom she soothed in his declining years, and a good woman (1777-1849).

RECANATI (6), a pretty Italian town, 15 m. S. of the Adriatic port Ancona, the birthplace of Leopardi; has a Gothic cathedral.

RECENSION, the name given to the critical revision of the text of an author, or the revised text itself.

RECHABITES, a tribe of Arab origin and Bedouin habits who attached themselves to the Israelites in the wilderness and embraced the Jewish faith, but retained their nomadic ways; they abstained from all strong drink, according to a vow they had made to their chief, which they could not be tempted to break, an example which Jeremiah in vain pleaded with the Jews to follow in connection with their vow to the Lord (See Jer.