Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/442

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TEENCH


TREVELYAN


passing of the Affirmation Bill, and in private he was a warm friend of and sympathizer with Holyoake, in whose biography there are various letters of his. D. Aug. 4, 1885.

TRENCH, Herbert, poet. B. Nov., 1865. Ed. Haileybury and Oxford. He became a Fellow of All Souls College, and from 1891 to 1908 was an examiner for the Board of Education. Trench travelled a good deal in Asia and Africa. He was for some years Director of the Haymarket Theatre, and he was Honorary Vice-Chairman of the Istituto Britannico at Florence. His many volumes of poetry won for him a high reputation among cultivated people, and in many of his poems (especially " Apollo and the Seaman " and other pieces of his New Poems, 1907) he gives expression to a vague Pantheistic creed. His sentiments in regard to Chris tianity are plainly shown in the following fine lines of his " Stanzas to Tolstoi " (in New Poems) :

The Man upraised on the Judsean crag

Captains for us the war with death no more.

His kingdom hangs as hangs the tattered flag Over the tomb of a great knight of yore.

TRENCHARD, John, Irish politician and reformer. B. 1662. Ed, Trinity College, Dublin. He was called to the Bar, but left the courts to become a Com missioner of Forfeited Estates in Ireland. Inheriting a fortune, he devoted himself to religious and political reform. In 1709, after he had issued a few political pam phlets, he published (anonymously) The Natural History of Superstition, an obviously Deistic work, though in reply to criticisms he purported to be a Christian (on ethical grounds). He founded and edited The Northern Whig in 1720, and he and Gordon (his co-editor) contributed a weekly letter to the London Journal under the joint pseudonym of " Cato." These letters were republished in four volumes in 1724. Trenchard contributed letters separately signed " Diogenes," whicb were 811


heavily assailed by the clergy for " in fidelity." For some years he was M.P, for Somerset, and, although a rich man r he wore himself out in the cause of reform. He was, Gordon wrote in the Biographia Britannica, " one of the worthiest, one of the ablest, one of the most useful men that ever any country was blest withal." His views were so notorious that he was- credited with the authorship of D Holbach s Contagion Sacree. D. Dec. 17, 1723.

TRENDELBURG, Professor Friedrich Adolph, German philosopher. B. Nov. 30, 1802. Ed. Kiel, Leipzig, and Berlin Universities. After teaching for some- years at Berlin University, Trendelburg was in 1833 appointed extraordinary pro fessor, and in 1837 ordinary professor, of philosophy. He was admitted to the Academy in 1846, and in the following year he became perpetual secretary of the historical-philosophical section. He was- regarded as one of the most distinguished professors at Berlin, and was equally learned in philology and philosophy. He translated Aristotle s De Anima (1833) and Logic (1837), and published a weighty commentary on them (1842). His chief works were Logischen Untersuchungen (2 vols., 1840) and Die sittliche Idee des Eechts (1849) ; but he wrote with authority on logic, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. In the main he followed Aristotle, regard ing the " soul " as an " entelechy," not endowed with personal immortality. He was a Theist. D. Jan. 24, 1872.

TREYELYAN, Arthur, writer. Trevel- yan was a Scottish landowner, brother of Sir Walter Trevelyan, and took an active part in the Secularist and general progres sive movement of the middle of the nine teenth century. He was a warm friend of Holyoake, and wrote in the Beasoner and the National Eeformer. " I will thank you to* propose me as a member of your Atheistical Society," he wrote to Holyoake in 1844 (Life and Letters of G. J. Holyoake, i, 98).. His little work, The Insanity of Mankind 812