held until 1886, when his growing celebrity as an Egyptologist procured him the appointment of Keeper of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum, in succession to Dr Samuel Birch. He was also elected in 1887 president of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, to whose Proceedings he was a constant contributor. The most important of his contributions to Egyptology are his Hibbert Lectures on “The Religion of the Egyptians,” delivered in 1879; and the translation of The Book of the Dead, with an ample commentary, published in the Transactions of the society over which he presided. He retired from the Museum under the superannuation rule in 1891, and died in London on the 14th of October 1897. He had been knighted the year before his death. He married in 1857 Ludovica von Brentano, member of a well-known German literary family.
RENOUVIER, CHARLES BERNARD (1815–1903), French
philosopher, was born at Montpellier on the 1st of January 1815,
and educated in Paris at the École Polytechnique. In early
life he took an interest in politics, and the approval extended by
Hippolyte Carnot to his Manuel républicain de l’homme et du
citoyen (1848) was the occasion of that minister’s fall. He
never held public employment, but spent his life writing, retired
from the world. He died on the 1st of September 1903. Renouvier
was the first Frenchman after Malebranche to formulate
a complete idealistic system, and had a vast influence on the
development of French thought. His system is based on Kant’s,
as his chosen term “Néo-criticism” indicates; but it is a transformation rather than a continuation of Kantianism. The two
leading ideas are a dislike to the Unknowable in all its forms,
and a reliance on the validity of our personal experience. The
former accounts for his acceptance of Kant’s phenomenalism,
combined with rejection of the thing in itself. It accounts, too,
for his polemic on the one hand against a Substantial Soul, a
Buddhistic Absolute, an Infinite Spiritual Substance; on the
other hand against the no less mysterious material or dynamic
substratum by which naturalistic Monism explains the world.
He holds that nothing exists except presentations, which are
not merely sensational, and have an objective aspect no less
than a subjective. To explain the formal organization of
our experience he adopts a modified version of the Kantian
categories. The insistence on the validity of personal experience
leads Renouvier to a yet more important divergence from Kant
in his treatment of volition. Liberty, he says, in a much wider
sense than Kant, is man’s fundamental characteristic. Human
freedom acts in the phenomenal, not in an imaginary noümenal
sphere. Belief is not intellectual merely, but is determined by
an act of will affirming what we hold to be morally good. In
his religious views Renouvier makes a considerable approximation
to Leibnitz. He holds that we are rationally justified in
affirming human immortality and the existence of a finite God
who is to be a constitutional ruler, but not a despot, over the
souls of men. He would, however, regard atheism as preferable
to a belief in an infinite Deity.
His chief works are: Essais de critique générale (1854–64), Science de la morale (1869), Uchronie (1876), Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques (1885–86), Philosophie analytique de l’histoire (1896–97), Histoire et solution des problèmes métaphysiques (1901); Victor Hugo: Le Poète (1893), Le Philosophe (1900); Les Dilemmes de la métaphysique pure (1901); Le Personnalisme (1903); Critique de la doctrine de Kant (1906, published by L. Prat).
See L. Prat, Les Derniers entretiens de Charles Renouvier (1904); M. Ascher, Renouvier und der französische Neu-Kriticismus (1900); E. Janssens, Le Néocriticisme de C. R. (1904); A. Darlu, La Morale de Renouvier (1904): G. Séailles, La Philosophie de C. R. (1905); A. Arnal, La Philosophie religieuse de C. R. (1907).
RENSSELAER, a city of Rensselaer county, New York,
U.S.A., in the eastern part of the state, on the E. bank of the
Hudson river, opposite Albany. Pop. (1900) 7466, of whom
1089 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 10,711. It is served
by the New York Central and the Boston & Albany railways,
which have shops here, and is connected with Albany
by three bridges across the Hudson. Rensselaer, originally
called Greenbush, was first settled in 1631, and the site formed
part of the large tract bought from the Indians by the agents
of Killian van Rensselaer and known as Rensselaerwyck. In
1810 a square mile of land within the present city limits was
acquired by a land speculator, was divided into lots and offered
for sale. Development followed, and five years later the village
was incorporated. In 1897 Greenbush was chartered as a
city, and its name was changed to Rensselaer. Its limits were
extended in 1902 by the annexation of the village of Bath
(pop. in 1900, 2504) and the western part of the township of
East Greenbush. Rensselaer manufactures knit-goods, wool
shoddy, felt, &c.
RENT. Various species of rent appear in Roman Law: rent
(canon) under the long leasehold tenure of Emphyteusis; rent
(reditus) of a farm; ground-rent (solarium); rent of state
lands (vectigal); and the annual rent (prensio) payable
for the jus superficiarum or right to the perpetual enjoyment
of anything built on the surface of land. (See Roman Law.)
English Law. (As to the rent of apartments, &c., see Lodger and Lodgings.)—Rent is a certain and periodical payment or service made or rendered by the tenant of a corporeal hereditament and issuing out of (the property of) such hereditament. Its characteristics, therefore, are (1) certainty in amount; (2) periodicity in payment or rendering; (3) the fact that rent is yielded and is, therefore, said “to lie in render,” as distinguished from profits à prendre in general, which are taken, and are, therefore, said to lie in prendre; (4) that it must issue out of (the profits of) a corporeal hereditament. A rent cannot be reserved out of incorporeal hereditaments such as advowsons (Co. Litt. 473, 1423). But rent may be reserved out of estates in reversion or remainder (see Real Property) which are not purely incorporeal. It is not essential that rent should consist in a payment of money. Apart from the rendering of services, the delivery of hens, horses, wheat, &c., may constitute a rent. But, at the present day, rent is generally a sum of money paid for the occupation of land. It is important to notice that this conception of rent was attained at a comparatively late period in the history of the law. The earliest rent seems to have been a form of personal service, generally labour on land, and was fixed by custom. The exaction of a competition or rack rent beyond that limited by custom was, if one may judge from the old Brehon law of Ireland, due to the presence upon the land of strangers in blood, probably at first outcasts from some other group.[1] The strict feudal theory of rent admitted labour on the lord’s land as a lower form, and developed the military service due to the crown or a lord as a higher form. Rent service is the oldest and most dignified kind of existing rent. It is the only one to which the power of distress attaches at common law, giving the landlord a preferential right over other creditors exercisable without the intervention of judicial authority (see Distress). The increasing importance of socage tenure, arising in part from the convenience of paying a certain amount, whether in money or kind, rather than comparatively uncertain services, led to the gradual evolution of the modern view of rent as a sum due by contract between two independent persons. At the same time the primitive feeling which regarded the position of landlord and tenant from a social rather than a commercial point of view is still of importance.
Rents, as they now exist in England, are divided into two great classes—rent service and rent charge. Classes of Rents.
Rent Service.—A rent service is so called because by it a tenure by means of service is created between the landlord and the tenant. The service is now represented by fealty, and is nothing more than nominal. Rent service is said to be incident to the reversion—that is, a grant of the reversion carries the rent with it (see Remainder). A power of distress is incident
- ↑ “The three rents are: rack rent from a person of a strange tribe, a fair rent from one of the tribe, and the stipulated rent which is paid equally by the tribe and the strange tribe.”—Senchus Mor, p. 159, cited by Maine, Village Communities, p. 187. See also Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892), pp. 181, 188, 215; The Growth of the Manor (by the same author) (London, 1905), pp. 230, 328; Pollock and Maitland, Hist. Eng. Law (Cambridge, 1895), ii. 128–134.
