Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/299

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

MONTESQUIOU-FEZENSAC


MOORE


Jesuits pressed him to receive the sacra ments when he was dying, and he consented, but did not ask them. D. Feb. 10, 1755.

MONTESQUIOU - FEZENSAC, Anne Pierre, Marquis de, French soldier. B. Oct. 17, 1739. From the service of the French court, in his early years, he passed to the army, in which he attained the rank of marshal. In 1781 he received the collar of the Order of the Holy Ghost, and in 1784 he was admitted to the Academy. Elected deputy to the States General in 1789, he broke his connection with the Court party and took command of the revo lutionary armies. The excesses naturally disgusted him, and he was compelled to retire from France from 1792 to 1795, when he returned and lived quietly at Paris. The Marquis wrote several able memoirs on economics, and a few smaller works. D. Dec. 30, 1798.

MONTGOMERY, Edmund, Ph.D., American writer. B. 1835. Montgomery was reared and educated in Germany, though born in Scotland. He studied under Moleschott and Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg University, and was a friend of Feuerbach. He wrote a work in German on the philosophy of Kant in 1871, and in the same year migrated to America. He contributed frequently to the Index and the Open Court, as well as to Mind and the Popular Science Monthly, and was Agnostic.

MONTGOLFIER, Joseph Michel,

French aeronaut. B. 1740. Ed. College de Tournon. Montgolfier was a youth of very independent and inventive spirit. In great privation he devoted himself to chemical experiments, and he then set up a paper-making business. With his brother Etienne he in 1783 made the first balloon, which was inflated with warm air. In the following year he invented the para chute. Warmly welcoming the Revolution, he accepted the post of Administrator of the Conservatoire des Arts et des Metiers, 525


and he was a member of the consulting staff for industry of the Ministry of the Interior. He was a member of the Legion of Honour and the Institut. Lalande, who knew him well, tells us that he was an Atheist. D. June 26, 1810.

MOOK, Friedrich, Ph.D., M.D., German writer. B. Sep. 29, 1844. Ed. Tubingen and Utrecht Universities. Deserting philosophy and theology, in which he had been trained, for medicine, he abandoned this in turn, and devoted himself to writing and lecturing. At Nuremburg (1871-73) he had one of the " free religious " communities, which we should now call Theistic, arid he wrote one or two moderately Rationalist works, chiefly his Leben Jem (2 vols., 1872-73). He seems gradually to have lost all religion, and after his thirtieth year did little but travel. In 1880 he set out on a three years tour round the world, and was drowned in the Jordan on Dec. 13, 1880.

MOORE, Professor Benjamin, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S., physiologist. Ed. Queen s College, Belfast, and Leipzig University. For five years Professor Moore was on the staff of University College, London, and he then spent some years on the staff of Yale University. He was for some time lecturer on physiology at Charing Cross Medical School, and from 1902 to 1914 he was professor of bio-chemistry at Liverpool University. He is a pronounced Theist, but otherwise an equally pronounced dis senter from the creeds. In his Origin and Nature of Life (Home University Library, 1913) he thinks the God of theology " a perfected superman " (p. 24), though the beauty of the world suggests to him " an infinite intelligence." He seems to be Agnostic as to immortality, and not dis pleased that what he calls the dogmas of a century ago are " now buried in a merciful oblivion " (p. 9).

MOORE, George, novelist. B. (Ireland) 1853. Ed. private tutor and Oscotfc 526