BLIND
BLUM
BLIND, Mathilde, poet, step-daughter
of Karl Blind. B. Mar. 21, 1841. Ed.
Belgium and St. John s Wood (London).
Her original name was Cohen, but she
adopted Blind s name when her mother
married him, and shared his views and his
exile. In her Autobiography she says that
she was for a time a Christian " in a certain
sense," but she early rejected all religion,
and was expelled from her London school
for heresy. She began to publish poems
in 1867, and in 1873 she translated Strauss s
The Old Faith and the New. Her chief
poem is The Ascent of Man (1888), and she
wrote various biographies of women. Dr.
Garnett says : " Her poetry is noble in
execution as in aspiration, and her character
was even more noble than her poetry."
Miss Blind inherited (1892) the fortune of
her step-brother, and bequeathed the greater
part of it to Newnham College, of which
she is one of the founders. D. Nov. 26,
1896.
BLOCH, Ivan, M.D., German medical and social writer. B. Apr. 8, 1872. Ed. Bonn, Heidelberg, and Berlin Universities. A physician in medical practice at Berlin, Dr. Bloch has written a series of important works on such subjects as prostitution and sexual psychology. He is a distinguished member of the Berlin Medical Society, the Goethe Society, and the Anthropological Society, and is an outspoken Monist and supporter of Professor Haeckel. In Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken (1914) he describes the great Monist leader as " the St. George who has slain the dragon of the ills of modern man, and has ruthlessly branded all the dualistic survivals of pre- scientific culture as obstacles to the mental and moral progress of humanity " (II, 357).
BLOUNT, Charles, Deist. B. Apr. 27, 1654. In 1679 he published Anima Mundi, a Deistic work in which his father is said to h ave collaborated. The book was burned, but re-issued. He also translated the life of Apollonius of Tyana, and wrote Religio Laid and other works. Blount fought for 83
liberty of expression and for legal recog
nition of marriage with a deceased wife s
sister. He professes in his works to be a
Christian, though he is more outspoken in
his posthumous Oracles of Reason (1693),
and he everywhere undermines Christianity
by pointing out its Pagan sources. D.
Aug., 1693.
BLOUNT, Sir Henry, Deist, father of preceding. B. Dec. 15, 1602. Ed. St. Albans and Oxford (Trinity Coll.). After graduating he studied law and travelled extensively, subsequently publishing a very popular Voyage to the Levant (1636). He was knighted in 1639, and served on various Eoyal Commissions. In The Oracles of Reason (mainly a collection of his son s letters) there is a Latin fragment on the soul by Sir H. Blount, in which he repre sents that God " is all things," that the material universe is his body, and that man is compacted of a union of God and the world and " dissipated by the dissolu tion of that union " (pp. 152-54). D. Oct. 9, 1682.
BLOUNT, Sir Thomas Pope, writer, eldest son of Sir Henry Blount. B. Sep. 12, 1649. Ed. privately. Blount, a man of considerable repute in his time, and member for St. Albans, was created a baronet in 1679. After the Eevolution he was Com missioner of Accounts in the House of Commons. His Essays on Several Subjects (published 1692), which were regarded by some of his contemporaries as " in no way inferior to Montaigne," are openly Deistic (see, especially, the essay added in the third edition, 1697). He published also a remarkable biographical dictionary and other works. D. June 30, 1697.
BLUM, Robert, German agitator. B. Nov. 10, 1807. Blum was the self-educated son of a worker, and was in succession a manual worker, a clerk, a soldier, and secretary to a theatre-director. He was one of the founders of the Schiller- Verein and a co-editor of the Theaterlexikon 84
