Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/423

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SUTHEELAND


SWINBURNE


negroes. He was a non-Christian Theist. In a letter published in the Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (6 vols., 1878-93) he explains to a correspondent that he is unconvinced that Christ was divinely commissioned to preach a revelation to men," and adds : " I am without religious feeling" (i, 117-19). He believes in God, he says, but rarely thinks about him, and he expresses his opinion about prayer in Coleridge s lines :

He prayest best who loveth best All tbings both great and small. His last words, spoken to Judge Hoar, were : " Judge, tell Emerson how much I love and revere him " (W. G. Shotwell s Life of C. Sumner, 1910, p. 718). His speeches and writings were published in fifteen volumes (1874-83). D Mar 11 1874.


SUTHERLAND, Alexander, M.A

Australian writer. B. (Glasgow) 1852 Ed. Melbourne University. Sutherland was taken by his father to Australia in 1864, and he became a pupil teacher at bydney. He studied very industriously and m 1871 he graduated at Melbourne University. After teaching mathematics for some years at the Scotch College, he m 1877 purchased the Carlton College which he conducted for the remainder of his life. Sutherland was a prolific writer as well as an able teacher. His Victoria find its Metropolis (1888) is the best history of Victoria; and he wrote school- books, poetry, and an admirable work on the evolution of morals (The Origin and growth of the Moral Instinct, 2 vols., 1898) which is one of the best on the subject Rationalist views are the main inspira tion of it. He was for eight years secretary F the Royal Society of Victoria, and was for a time Registrar of Melbourne Uni versity. D. August, 1902.


Field Marshal Kinsky. She studied Kant Plato, and Humboldt while she was still the young Countess Kinsky, and lost her reli gl ous beliefs. She says in her Memoirs 909, i, 36) that if she had been asked at that time what religion she followed she would have said: "None; I am too religious." After her marriage with Baron von Suttner in 1876 she made a thorough study of Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel, and accepted evolution in its full significance. In this mood she wrote (under the pen-name of B. Oulot) her Inventarium einer Seele (1880) , an imaginary autobiography. Chapter xxx expresses her complete rejection of Christian beliefs, and expounds a vague Theism or Pantheism which is not far removed from Spencerian Agnosticism. In 1887 she met the English Pacifist, Hodgson Pratt, and from that | year she has been honourably distinguished I as one of the most ardent fighters against ! war in Europe. Her novel, Die Waffen Nieder (1889 ; in English, Lay Down Your Arms, 1892), has circulated all over the world, though the sequel, Martha s Kinder 1902), is not so well known. Many of the Baroness s novels have been assailed in Austria and Germany as " Materialistic " a humorous commentary on the abuse of that term, for she is acknowledged to be a most fervent idealist.

" SWIFT, Benjamin." See PATERSON W. R.


SUTTNER, Baroness Bertha von,

Austrian reformer. B. June 9, 1843. Ed privately. Baroness von Suttner is a daughter of the Bohemian Count and


SWINBURNE, Algernon Charles, poet B. Apr. 5, 1837. Ed. Eton and Oxford (Balliol). Of an aristocratic High Church family, Swinburne was brought up very religiously, and was very pious in his boyhood. He read much, both at Eton

j and Oxford, abandoned all his religious beliefs, and became a Rationalist and (though a Tory all his life) a Republican. In his twenty-first year (1858) he applauded Orsmi s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. He began to write verse at Oxford,

I though he was little noticed until 1865, when his Atalanta in Calydon forced wide 774