EAYNAL
EECLUS
never prayed or went to church, and
whose very high ethic was utilitarian.
D. Mar. 5, 1895.
RAYNAL, Guillaume Thomas Fran cois, French writer. B. Apr. 11, 1713. Ed. Jesuit College, Pezenas. Eaynal entered the Jesuit Society and became a priest. After preaching for some time at Pezenas, he was in 1747 attached to the Saint Sulpice parish at Paris. There he became a great friend of Helvetius and D Holbach, and adopted Deistic opinions. He was ejected from the Society, and was appointed editor of the Mercure. The " Abbe Raynal," as he continued to be called, was one of the most prolific writers of the time, and a man of great learning and ability. His chief work is his Histoire philosophique et politique des ctablisscments et du commerce des Europeans avec les deux Indes (4 vols., 1770), in which he scourges the Jesuits and the Inquisition. It was reprinted in 1780, with more violent attacks on religion, and was burned by the hangman in the following year. Eaynal fled to Prussia, then to the Court of Catherine the Great. He was permitted to return to France in 1778 and live in the provinces. He was elected to the States General, but declined the honour on account of his age ; and he was a member of the Institut. D. Mar. 6, 1796.
READ, Professor Carveth, M.A., philo sopher. B. Mar. 16, 1848. Ed. Cam bridge (Christ s Church College), Leipzig, and Heidelberg Universities. Professor Bead was enabled to study at the German universities by winning the Hibbert Travel ling Scholarship. He lectured on philo sophy and literature for some years at Wren s, and from 1903 to 1911 he was j Grote Professor of philosophy at London University and lecturer on comparative psychology at University College. His views are best given in his Metaphysics of Nature (1905) and Natural and Social Morals (1909). The ninth chapter of the latter work discusses " Eeligion and
639
Morals," rejects Theism and Pantheism,
and puts ethics on a purely humanitarian
base. " With the spread of civilization
the religious spirit declines, because so
much strength of character exists as to
make civilization possible" (p. 252). Pro
fessor Eead is a member of the E. P. A.
READE, William Win wood, writer. B. Dec. 26, 1838 (nephew of Charles Eeade). Ed. Winchester and Oxford. Eeade opened his literary career in 1860 with a novel (Liberty Hall, 3 vols.), and in the following year he published a history of the Druids (The Veil of Isis), in the course of which he often criticizes religion. During 1862-63 he travelled in Africa, and after his return he entered St. Mary s Hospital as a student. He volunteered for service at the Cholera Hospital at Southampton in 1866. During the Ashanti War he w r as correspondent for the Times (The Story of the Ashanti Campaign, 1874), and his health never recovered from the strain. His Martyrdom of Man had been published in 1872, and proved one of the most brilliant and popular anti-Christian books of the period. An introduction by F. Legge to the eighteenth edition (1910) gives an interesting account of the coura geous author and his opinions. He was not " an Atheist," as the Diet, of Nat. Biog. says, but a Spencerian Agnostic. He gave the name of God to the " First Cause and Inscrutable Mystery," rejected the idea of immortality, and was very drastically opposed to Christianity. His final beliefs are embodied in The Outcast, a novel dealing with the hardships of a professed heretic, which he wrote in 1874. D. Apr. 24, 1875.
REGLUS, Professor Elie Michel,
French ethnologist. B. 1827. Elie Reclus and his two distinguished brothers were the sons of a French Protestant pastor. Elie took part in the Eevolution of 1848, and was driven out of France. He was appointed professor of comparative myth ology at Brussels University. In 1871 he 640
