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PHILLIPS
1471
PHILOSOPHY

per cent. of its graduates actually go to college.

Phillips, Wen′dell, the distinguished orator and abolitionist, was born of wealthy and aristocratic parentage at Boston, Mass., Nov. 29, 1811. After several years' study in the public Latin school he entered Harvard, from which he graduated in 1831. While yet in his collegiate course Phillips was noted not only for superior scholarship but for oratorical gifts and marked purity and dignity of character. In 1834, having taken a three years' course of legal study, Phillips was admitted to the bar at Boston. A little more than a year after entering upon the practice of his profession he saw the mobbing of Garrison (q. v.) at Boston, which made a deep and lasting impression and awoke serious thought upon the evils of slavery. It was in Faneuil Hall that Phillips, then only 26, delivered the first of those marvelous philippics that did so much to arouse antislavery sentiment, the occasion being a meeting to denounce the murder of Lovejoy at Alton, Ill., for advocating anti-slavery sentiments in his paper published at that place. From that time Phillips continued the faithful and unflinching opponent of slavery, raising his voice against it throughout the land and devoting his gifts and varied powers to the single purpose of its abolition and destruction. Although the matter of Phillips' speeches was nearly always fiery and impassioned, his delivery as well as his manner was invariably calm, reserved, perfectly easy and natural, giving him a power over audiences that compelled interest and attention, even when they most disagreed with him. Very appropriately was he called The Unagitated Agitator. He died at Boston on Feb. 2, 1884.

Phillips′burg, N. J., a city of Warren County, on Delaware River, opposite Easton, Pa., where the river is crossed by two iron bridges. It is situated in a fine agricultural, limestone and iron-ore region. Besides extensive ironworks, a rolling-mill, boiler and machine works and a reaper and mower factory, there are a silk-mill and railroad-shops for three railroads. There are good public, parochial and business schools, several churches, municipal buildings and a public library. Population 13,903.

Philoctetes (fil-ok-tē′tēz), a famous archer, the friend and armor-bearer of Hercules, who bequeathed him his bow and poisoned arrows. As one of the suitors of Helen he led seven ships against Troy; but being bitten in the foot by a snake or, according to one account, wounded by his own arrows, as his wound gave forth an unendurable stench, the Greeks left him on Lemnos, where he remained ten years. But an oracle declaring that Troy could not be taken without the aid of Philoctetes, Ulysses and Neoptolemus were sent to Lemnos to bring him to the Grecian camp, where, healed by Æsculapius or his sons, he slew Paris and otherwise assisted in the capture of Troy.

Philology (fĭ-lŏl′ō̇-gy̆). This word is derived from two Greek words, philos, a friend, and logos, a word; and like many other words it has varied greatly in its meaning. In the time of Plato it meant the love of discussion, confined mainly to the moral and social questions in which Plato delighted; and the method of discussion was the Socratic one of asking questions. At Alexandria the philologer gave attention to all the knowledge of his day, brought together for the first time in its great library; but the scholars of Alexandria applied themselves especially to the study of the older Greek literature. It widened again at the revival of learning to include the study of grammar, rhetoric, literature, poetry, archæology — in a word, all the “humane” studies. Since the middle of the 19th century the word has been used in a more restricted sense. Whereas philology formerly meant the study of literature, it is now limited to the study of languages, apart from the literature embodied in them. It is the science which deals with the origin, development and general structure of languages and of language as a whole. In its progress not only has great light been thrown on the origin of different languages; but they have been classified and grouped, and many languages which seemed to have no points of similarity have been traced to a common origin. Sir William Jones, the great oriental linguist, declared that “no philologer could examine Sanskrit, Greek and Latin without believing them to have sprung from the same source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for believing that both the Gothic and the Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit.” There are two main classes of languages: Those which show no signs of inflection — for example, those in which the plural of man is not formed by a vowel-change (as our men) nor by an added suffix (as in Latin homin-es), but by a combination of two words (as our man-kind); and second, those which are inflected in greater or less degree. This class is divided into two great families: the Semitic, comprising Hebrew Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac; the Indo-Germanic or Aryan family, the chief languages of which are Sanskrit, Armenian, Albanian, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic or Germanic and Slavonic. See Isaac Taylor's Origin of the Aryans.

Philosophy (Greek philos, a friend, and sophia, wisdom). A complete and final definition of this word is impossible, as the objects of the science, its methods and even the possibility of its being or becoming a science are matters of debate between different schools. Philosophy has