Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/422

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SULLY


SUMNEE


Bonaparte. Sue was the son of a dis tinguished Parisian surgeon, and he had the Empress Josephine for godmother. He studied medicine, and was assistant- surgeon in the Spanish expedition of 1823. He then became a naval surgeon, and travelled much with the fleet. In 1829 his father left him a fortune, and he settled .in Paris. A novel he wrote in 1830 (Kernock le pirate) was so successful that he applied himself seriously to fiction. His My stores de Paris began to appear in the Journal des Debats in 1842, and people fought for copies of the paper. It was published in ten volumes in 1813. Another Paris journal gave him a hundred thousand j francs for his next novel, Le juif errant \ (10 vols., 1845). In his earlier years he had been aristocratic, but in 1850, when , he was returned to the Chambre, he sat j on the extreme left with the anti-clericals. He was proscribed at the coup d etat of 1851. D. Aug. 3, 1857.

SULLY, Professor James, M.A., LL.D., psychologist. B. Mar. 3, 1842. Ed. Taun- ton Independent College, Eegent s Park College, and Gottingen and Berlin Univer sities. He was a gold medallist of London University. For some years he lectured on education for the College of Preceptors and at Cambridge University, and he then became professor of psychology at London University College. He is now Professor Emeritus. His chief works are Pessimism (1877), Outlines of Psychology (1884), Teacher s Handbook of Psychology (1886), The Human Mind (1892), and Studies of Childhood (1895). Professor Sully belongs to the empirical school, and is Agnostic as to the " soul " and its future.

SULLY PRUDHOMME, Rene Fran- QOis Armand, French poet. B. Mar. 16, 1839. Ed. Lycee Bonaparte. He was the son of a rich merchant, but he served some time in the professions of engineering and of law before he settled down to letters. In the preface to his first volume of poems (Stances et poemes, 1865) he declared him- 771


self a sceptic, but observed that he did not wish to hurt his father s feelings. Les epreuves (1866) and Les solitudes (1869) completed his reputation ; and he also wrote a few works on aesthetics and trans lated the first book of Lucretius. He was admitted to the Academy in 1881, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1901. Prudhomme, whose poetry takes a very high rank in recent French literature, was a nationalist of the rare morbid type. He never believed, yet always professed that he wanted to believe. At the most he believed in a sort of Pantheistic "divine," which reveals itself in duty. " His malady," says Gaston Paris in a fine appreciation of him, " is the malady

of our age he desired an illusion and

found it impossible to believe in it " (Pen- seurs et Poetes, p. 233). D. Sep. 7, 1907.


SUMNER, Charles, American states man. B. Jan. 6, 1811. Ed. Harvard University and Law School. He was admitted to the Bar in 1834 ; but he did so much writing and lecturing in addition to his legal work that he broke down, and spent three years (1837-40) in Europe. On his return to America Sumner took an. active part in the Abolition movement. He was one of its foremost orators, and an oration which he made in 1845, " The True Grandeur of Nations," was long remembered in America. In 1851 he was returned to the Senate, where he continued the campaign with such courage that in 1856 a southern Senator dangerously assaulted him. He was disabled for three years, and it is said that the assault was responsible for his fatal illness years afterwards ; yet Sumner pleaded that his assailant should be regarded only as " the instrument of a malign power." In 1861 he was appointed Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Eolations. Sumner was the most accomplished American statesman of his time, and probably second to none in political and personal integrity. He worked hard for the reform of politics, and advocated the enfranchisement of the 77-2