Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/109

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She continued to correspond with Leibnitz and to study philosophy, and her house at Eichmond was more or less a Deistic centre. She ascended the throne in 1727, and on several occasions during the King s absence, when she acted as Eegent, an Act of Parliament was passed excusing her from taking the oath. She refused to receive the sacrament on her death-bed, though pressed to do so by the Archbishop of Canterbury (see the memoirs of Lord Hervey, her intimate friend, ii, 528). Horace Walpole (Reminiscences, p. 66) says that she was " at least not orthodox," and Chesterfield (Characters, p. 1406) ac curately describes her as " a Deist, believ ing in a future state." The Earl of Bristol (Letter-Books of John Hervey, iii, p. 196) represents her heterodoxy as widely known. D. Nov. 20, 1737.

CARPENTER, Edward, author. B. Aug. 29, 1844. Ed. Brighton College and Cambridge (Trinity Hall). He became a priest of the Church of England in 1870 and a Fellow of Trinity, but in 1874 he resigned the Fellowship and quitted the Church. The writings of Walt Whitman deeply influenced his development, both in regard to style and thought. Until 1881 he lectured for the University Extension Movement, but he then retired to a small farm near Sheffield, to devote himself hence forward to manual and literary work. Carpenter emphatically rejects Christianity (see, especially, My Days and Dreams, 1916), but he leans to a mysticism of a Hindu type. His entire ethic, or anti-ethic, is a defiance of the current creeds.

CARPENTER, Professor William Benjamin, C.B., M.D., LL.D., F.E.S., naturalist. B. Oct. 29, 1813. Ed. in his father s school Bristol, Bristol Medical School, London University College, and Edinburgh Medical School. Carpenter s papers on medical subjects early attracted attention, and he was invited to lecture on medical jurisprudence at Bristol. In 1844 he became Fullerian Professor of physics at 145


the Eoyal Institution, then lecturer on physics at the London Hospital, professor of forensic medicine at University College, and Swiney lecturer on geology at the British Museum. He held the medal of the Eoyal Society and the Lyell medal of the Geological Society, and he was a cor responding member of the Institute of France. Dr. Carpenter, a man of exception ally wide scientific attainments and an enthusiast for popular education, was Theistic (in a liberal sense), but not even Unitarian (see Nature and Man, 1888). At his death E. Proctor (Knowledge, Dec. 1, 1885) wrote that he accepted " the advanced lessons of later writers." He was President of the London Sunday Lecture Society (which gave frequent anti- Christian lectures) from 1869 until his death, and of the Newcastle Sunday Lecture Society. D. Nov. 19, 1885.

CARR, Herbert Wildon, D.Litt., philo sophical writer. B. Jan. 16, 1857. Ed. privately and at King s College, London. Dr. Carr is a lecturer on psychology at King s College, Honorary Fellow of the University of London, and President of the Aristotelian Society. He was Secretary of the Aristotelian Society 1883-1915. He is the leading champion of Bergson in England, but in his Philosophy of Change (1914), after observing that Bergson attri butes a high probability to the idea of survival, he adds : "I should not myself rank the probability so high " (p. 193). In regard to Theism he agrees with the heterodox views of Bergson.

CARRA, Jean Louis, French politician. B. 1743. He fled to Germany in his boy hood, and on his return to France took service in a cai dinal s household and then in the King s Library, meantime writing a number of Deistic, scientific, and historical works. He accepted the Eevolution with enthusiasm, and was for a time one of the chief orators of the Jacobins. He passed to the Girondins, and was guillotined on Oct. 31, 1793.

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