POINCARE
POMEROY
and the Bureau des Longitudes. Few
living Frenchmen had an equal load of
high honours. He was a thinker of high
ethical idealism and a thorough Ration
alist. In his Dernieres Pensees (1913)
he dissociates himself firmly from the
Churches, and is Theistic only in the sense
that God is the moral ideal. D. July 17
1912.
POINCARE, Professor Lucien, D.Sc.,
French physicist. B. 1862. Ed. Lyc6e de Bar-le-Duc, Lycee Louis le Grand, and Ecole Normale Superieure. From 1886 to
1893 he taught at Bourges and Marseilles, and then at the Lycee Louis le Grand. He was appointed lecturer at Paris Uni versity in 1899, and was professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Sevres from
1894 to 1900. In 1902 he was nominated Inspector General of Public Instruction. Poincare is an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and his works on physics, of which several (The New Physics and its Evolution, 1907; Electricity, Present and Future, 1909) have appeared in English, are of the first importance.
POINCARE, Raymond, D. en D. , L. es L. ,
ninth President of the French Republic. B. Aug. 20, 1860. Ed. Lycee de Bar-le- Duc, and Lycee Louis le Grand. He is the cousin of Henri, and the brother of Lucien; but he took to law instead of science, and practised with distinction at the Paris Bar. He entered politics, on the anti-clerical side, during the final struggle with the Church, and made rapid progress. He was Minister of Public Instruction in
1893 and 1895, and Minister of Finance in
1894 and 1906. From 1911 to 1913 he was Premier, and from 1913 to 1920 President of the Republic. Poincare was admitted to the Academy in 1909, and he was elected Rector of Glasgow University in 1914. He takes a warm interest in ethical culture in France, and is Vice- President of the Society for the Encourage ment of Virtue. His official positions imply that he has never been an aggressive
613
Rationalist, but in his speeches as Minister
of Education and his fine addresses at the
graves of distinguished Rationalist col
leagues he makes his position clear (Idees
contemporaines, 1906 a collection of his
speeches).
POLLOCK, The Right Honourable Sir Frederick, third Baronet, M.A., LL.D., D.C.L., jurist. B. Dec. 10, 1845. Ed. Eton and Cambridge (Trinity College). He was admitted to the Bar in 1871. In 1882-83 he was professor of jurisprudence at London University College ; from 1883 to 1903 he was Corpus professor of juris prudence at Oxford; and from 1884 to 1890 professor of Common Law at the Inns of Court. He was called to the Privy Council in 1911, and has been Judge of the Admiralty Court of Cinque Ports since 1914. He had succeeded his father as baronet in 1888. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1902), Correspondent of the French Institut (1894), and Associate of the Royal Academy of Belgium (1913). Sir Frederick s works on law are numerous and weighty, but his literary activity is not confined to jurisprudence. Besides an Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (1890) and other volumes, he has written a learned and sympathetic work on Spinoza (Spinoza : Life and Philosophy, 1880), in which his own Rationalism finds frequent expression. "It has hitherto," he says, " been the aim of religions to fix man s ideal in life once for all. We now find that man s life and thought will not be fixed, that our ideals themselves are shifting and changing shapes " (1912 edition, p. 345). He pays generous tribute to Clifford and Haeckel ; says that " it is the makers of articles and dogmas who are irreverent" (p. 346), and resents "the great and deadly serpent Superstition " (p. 347). He seems to be nearer Agnos ticism than to Spinoza s Pantheism (which he prefers to call Theism).
POMEROY, Ernest Arthur George,
seventh Viscount Harberton, writer. B. 614
