PALLAS
rantisms " and all efforts to rehabilitate
Theism. A thorough Agnostic and anti-
Pragmatist, Miss Paget grants only that
" there might come to be a kind of religious
importance and use in our thought of an
unthinking (not an unthinkable !) Beyond "
(ii, 211). Her writings on medieval Italy
are important and attractive.
PAINE, Thomas, writer. B. (Thetford, Norfolkshire) Jan. 29, 1737. Ed. Thetford Grammar School. Son of a Quaker of humble position, Paine attended school only until he was thirteen. He was then put to his father s business of making stays, but at nineteen he left home and for a time went to sea. For two years (1759-61) he worked at stay-making in London, and he was then an exciseman for five years. Eeturning to London in 1766, he taught (and, apparently, preached occasionally) there for two years, and he then returned to the excise for six years (1768-74). In 1774 he went to America, and for eighteen months edited the Pennsylvania Magazine. He was already known to Franklin, and his vigorous pen soon made a name for him among the radical-republicans. In 1776 he published, anonymously, Common Sense, of which 120,000 copies were sold in three months. In the same year he had a short term of service in the army, he was for three years in the employment of Congress, and then for a year clerk to the Pennsyl vania Assembly. In 1781 he discharged a mission to France. His services to America, especially by his pen, were such that Congress in 1782 awarded him $800, and $3,000 in 1785 ; and in 1784 the State of New York granted him 277 acres and 500. During the next few years he devoted himself quietly to perfecting an iron bridge, which he invented. He took this to France in 1787, then to London, where his model was exhibited. The publication of his Bights of Man (1791 and 1792 a reply to Burke), however, drew upon him a sentence of outlawry in England ; and Paine, who had already been elected to the Convention by the Pas-de-
577
Calais, escaped to France. He did not
speak French, and he opposed the more
violent, so that he was himself presently
imprisoned. He had already (in Paris)
written the first part of his Age of Reason,
and he completed it in jail (1793-94). No
other work of so little scholarship has ever
had so wide and deep an influence as this
caustic and penetrating criticism of the
plain Christian story. It was the pro
nouncement of "common sense" on the
Christian claims, the first democratization
of Deism. He returned to the United
States in 1802, but his outspoken Deism
had ruined his popularity. His later years
were not happy, but the persistent slanders
about his character and the ludicrous story
about his despair when he was dying are
finally refuted in Dr. Moncure Conway s
masterly Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols.,
1892). Dr. Conway has also edited his
complete works (4 vols., 1894-96). Paine s
bones were brought to England by the
direction of Cobbett in 1819, but they sub
sequently disappeared. D. June 8, 1809.
PAINLEYE, Professor Paul, French mathematician. B. Dec. 5, 1863. Ed. Ecole Normale Superieure. He graduated in the mathematical sciences in 1887, and was appointed professor of general mathe matics at Paris University. Painleve is one of the most brilliant mathematicians of France, and has received a shower of honours. He is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Officer of Public Instruction, Knight of the Polar Star of Sweden, and Member of the Institut, the Administrative Council of the Conservatoire of Arts and Trades, the Academies of Science of Bologna and Stockholm, the Accademia dei Lincei, etc. He is a philosophical Eationalist, and supported the erection of a statue to Servetus.
PALLAS, Peter Simon, M.D., German zoologist. B. Sep. 22, 1741. Ed. Gottin- gen and Leyden Universities. Pallas won early distinction by his zoological writings (Elenchus Zoophytarum, 1766 ; and Misccl- 578 x
