Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/303

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286
RIBOT, T. A.—RICARDO

and the more austere; the later work, irrespective of its subject, the freer and broader. But even in that which is quite early there is a curious and impressive intensity of conception and presentation. His visions of elderly women and young girls remain upon the memory. His women, wrinkled and worn, have had the experience of a hard and grinding world; his children, his young girls, are the quintessence of innocence and happy hopefulness, and life is a jest to his boys. His religious pieces, in which Ribera affected him, have conviction and force. Into portraits and into character studies, but more especially into genre subjects, Ribot was apt to introduce Still-life, and to make much of it. Herein, as in his sense of homeliness, he resembled Chardin. But again, Chardin-like, he painted Still-life for its own sake, by itself, and always with an extraordinary sense of the solidity and form, the texture and the hue, and, it must be added also, the very charm of matter.  (F. We.) 


RIBOT, THÉODULE ARMAND (1839-), French psychologist, was born at Guingamp on the 18th of December 1839, and was educated at the Lycée de St Brieuc. In 1856 he began to teach, and was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1862. In 1885 he gave a course of lectures on " Experimental Psychology " at the Sorbonne, and in 1888 was appointed professor of that subject at the College of France. His thesis for his doctor's degree, republished in 1882, Hérédité: étude psychologique (5th ed., 1889), is his most important and best known book. Following the experimental and synthetic methods, he has brought together a large number of instances of inherited peculiarities; he pays particular attention to the physical element of mental life, ignoring all spiritual or non material factors in man. In his work on La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine (1870), he shows his sympathy with the sensationalist school, and again in his translation of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology. Besides numerous articles, he has written on Schopenhauer, Philosophie de Schopenhauer (1874; 7th ed., 1896), and on the contemporary psychology of Germany (La Psychologie allernande- contemporaine, 1879; 13th ed., 1898), also four little .monographs on Les Maladies de la mémoire (1881, 13th ed., 1898); De la volonté (1883; 14th ed., 1899); De la personnalité (1885; 8th ed., 1899); and La Psychologie de l'attention (1888), which supply useful data to the student of mental disease.

Other works by him are:-La Psychologie des sentiments (1896); L'Evolution des idées générales (1897); Essai sur Vimagination créatrice (1900); La Logigue. des sentiments (1904); Essai sur les passions (1906). Of the above the following have been translated into English:~English Psychology (1873); Heredity: a Psychological Study of its Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences (1875); Diseases of Memory: An Essay in the Positive Psychology (1882); Diseases of the Will (New York, 1884); German Psychology of to-day, tr. ]. M. Baldwin (New York, 1886); The Psychology of Attention (Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1890); Diseases of Personality (Chicago, 1895); The Psychology of the Emotions (1897); The Evolution of General Ideas, tr. F. A. Welby (Chicago, 1899); Essay on the Creative Imagination, tr. A. H. N. Baron (1906).


RICARD, LOUIS GUSTAVE (1823-1873), French painter, was born in Marseilles in 1823, and studied first under Auber in his native town, and subsequently under Coignet in Paris. The formation of his masterly, distinguished style in portraiture was, however, due rather to ten years' intelligent copying of the old masters at the Louvre and at the Italian galleries, than to any school training. He was a master of technique, and his portraits-about two hundred-reveal an extraordinary insight into the character of his sitters. Nevertheless, for some time after his death his name was almost forgotten by the public, and it is only of quite recent years that he has been conceded the position among the leading masters of the modern French school which is his due. A portrait, of himself, and one of Alfred de Musset, are at the Luxembourg Gallery. Among his best known worksare the portrait of his mother, and those of the painters Fromentin, Heilbuth and Chaplin.

See Gustave Ricard, by Camille Mauclair (Paris, Librairie de l'art).


RICARDO, DAVID (1772-1823), English economist, was born in London on the 19th of April 1772, of Jewish origin. His father, who was of Dutch birth, bore an honourable character and was a successful member of the Stock Exchange. At the age of fourteen Ricardo entered his father's office, where he showed much aptitude for business. About the time when he attained his majority he abandoned the Hebrew faith and conformed to the Anglican Church, a change which seems to have been connected with his marriage to Miss Wilkinson, which took place in 1793. In consequence of the step thus taken he was separated from his family and thrown on his own resources. His ability and uprightness were known, and he at once entered on such a successful career in the profession to which he had been brought up that at the age of twenty-five, we are told, he was already rich. He now began to occupy himself with scientific pursuits, and gave some attention to mathematics as well as to chemistry and mineralogy; but, having met with Adam Smith's great work, he threw himself with ardour into the study of political economy. His first publication (1809) was The High Price of Bullion a Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes. This tract was an expansion of a series of articles which the author had contributed to the Morning Chronicle. It gave a fresh stimulus to the controversy, which had for some time been discontinued, respecting the resumption of cash payments, and indirectly led to the appointment of a committee of the House of Commons, commonly known as the Bullion Committee, to consider the whole question. The report of the committee asserted the same views which Ricardo had put forward, and recommended the repeal of the Bank Restriction Act. Notwithstanding this, the House of Commons declared in the

teeth of the facts that paper had undergone no depreciation. Ricardo's first tract, as well as another on the same subject, attracted much attention.

In 1811 he made the acquaintance of James Mill, whose introduction to him arose out of the publication of Mill's tract entitled Commerce Defended. Whilst Mill doubtless largely affected his political ideas, he was, on his side, under obligations to Ricardo in the purely economic field; Mill said in 1823 that he himself and J. R. M'Culloch were Ricardo's disciples, and, he added, his only genuine ones.

In 1815, when the Corn Laws were under discussion, he published his Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock. This was directed against a recent tract by Malthus entitled Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restraining the Free Importation of Foreign Corn. The reasonings of the essay are based on the theory of rent which has often been called by the name of Ricardo; but the author distinctly states that it was not due to him. "In all that I have said concerning the origin and progress of rent I have briefly repeated, and endeavoured to elucidate, the principles which Malthus has so ably laid down on the same subject in his Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent." We now know that the theory had been fully stated, before the time of Malthus, by Anderson; it is in any case clear that it was no discovery of Ricardo. Ricardo states in this essay a set of propositions, most of them deductions from the theory of rent, which are in substance the same as those afterwards embodied in the Principles, and regarded as characteristic of his system, such as that increase of wages does not raise prices; that profits can be raised only by a fall in wages and diminished only by a rise in wages; and that profits, in the whole progress of society, are determined by the cost of the production of the food which is raised at the greatest expense. It does not appear that, excepting the theory of foreign trade, anything of the nature of fundamental doctrine, as distinct from the special subjects of banking and taxation, is laid down in the Principles which does not already appear in this tract. We find in it, too, the same exclusive regard to the interest of the capitalist class, and the same identification of their interest with that of the whole nation, which are generally characteristic of his writings.