Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/365

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

RIBEYROLLES


RICARDO


President of the Anthropological Section of the British Association in 1900. Mr. Clodd publishes in his Memories (p. 184) a pungent letter which Sir John wrote him when Mrs. Humphry Ward was trying to secure membership of the Church of England for people who rejected the Virgin Birth. " If they were only called by the same name of Christians," he says, " it matters not that they are ritualists or agnostics : the name is the groat thing which would enable them to enjoy the Eucharist together." D. Dec. 16, 1915.

RIBEYROLLES, Charles de, French writer and politician. 5.1812. Ed. Catholic seminary. Ribeyrolles s parents sent him to study for the Church, but the spirit of the Revolution of 1830 reached him, and he discarded theology. He spent ten years of journalistic struggle and study at Paris, until in 1840 he joined the staff of the Revue de France. For a few years he edited L Emancipation at Toulouse, but he returned to Paris to share the battle, and became editor of La Reforme. He was banished after the coup d etat, and went to Jersey. Expelled from there in turn, he went to London, then on to Brazil, where he caught yellow fever. Victor Hugo, a fellow exile, greatly admired Ribayrolles, and wrote verses for his tomb. D. June 13, 1861.

RIBOT, Alexandre Felix Joseph,

L. es L., L. en D., French statesman. B. Feb. 7, 1842. Ed. Lycee St. Omer and Lyc6e Bonaparte. He was admitted to the Paris Bar in 1864, and was appointed Substitute at the Tribunal de la Seine in 1870. Ribot entered politics, and became secretary general at the Ministry of Justice in 1878 ; and he was Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1890 to 1893, Premier and Minister of the Interior in 1892-93, Premier and Minister of Finance in 1895, Minister of Finance from 1914 to 1917, and Premier again in 1917. In 1909 he was elected to the Senate. Ribot is a moderate Liberal, and he opposed the drastic anti-clerical G57


policy of M. Combes ; but he supported the final settlement of the Church, and co-operated in the secularization of the French schools. He is a member of the French Academy and the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. In 1887 he was President of the Societe de Legislation Comparee, and from 1887 to 1902 he was President of the Societe Generale des Prisons. He wrote a biography of Lord Erskine (1866) and a number of political and educational works.

RIBOT, Professor Theodule Armand,

D. es L., French philosopher. B. Dec. 18, 1839. Ed. Lycee de Saint Brieue and Ecole Normale Superieure. He was appointed professor of philosophy at the Lycee de Vesoul, and in 1876 he founded and edited the Revue philosophique. In 1885 he became professor of experimental psycho logy at the Sorboiine, and in 1888 professor of experimental and comparative psychology at the College de France. Ribot s works on psychology (beginning with his Psycho- logie anglaise contemporaine, 1870) are among the most authoritative in his science in France. He translated into French Herbert Spencer s Principles of Psychology, and rendered great service in detaching French psychology from metaphysical and theological matters. He rejects entirely the idea of a spiritual principle, separable from the body, and regards consciousness as an epiphenomenon (see, especially, Les maladies de la personality, 1884). Like Maudsley and Lewes, he studies mind from the point of view of physiology. D. Dec. 9, 1917.

RIGARDO, David, economist and philan thropist. B. Apr. 19, 1772. Son of a Dutch Jew who had settled in London, Ricardo had little schooling, and he entered his father s stockbroking business at the age of fourteen. He quarrelled with his father by abandoning the Jewish creed, and set up a financial business of his own, at which he made a fortune. He took a very keen and wide interest in science, and was

658