and was a reward for the king’s treatise, Assertio, septem sacramentorum, against Luther. When Henry broke with the papacy, Pope Paul III. deprived him of this designation, but in 1544 the title of “Defender of the Faith” was confirmed to Henry by parliament, and has since been used by all his successors on the English throne.
DEFERENT (Lat. deferens, bearing down), in ancient
astronomy, the mean orbit of a planet, which carried the epicycle
in which the planet revolved. It is now known to correspond to
the actual orbit of the planet round the sun.
DEFFAND, MARIE ANNE DE VICHY-CHAMROND, Marquise
du (1697–1780), a celebrated Frenchwoman, was born at the
château of Chamrond near Charolles (department of Saône-et-Loire)
of a noble family in 1697. Educated at a convent in Paris,
she showed, along with great intelligence, a sceptical and cynical
turn of mind. The abbess, alarmed at the freedom of her views,
arranged that Massillon should visit and reason with her, but he
accomplished nothing. Her parents married her at twenty-one
years of age to her kinsman, Jean Baptiste de la Lande, marquis
du Deffand, without consulting her inclination. The union
proved an unhappy one, and resulted in a separation as early
as 1722. Madame du Deffand, young and beautiful, is said by
Horace Walpole to have been for a short time the mistress of the
regent, the duke of Orleans (Walpole to Gray, January 25, 1766).
She appeared in her earlier days to be incapable of any strong
attachment, but her intelligence, her cynicism and her esprit
made her the centre of attraction of a brilliant circle. In 1721
began her friendship with Voltaire, but their regular correspondence
dates only from 1736. She spent much time at Sceaux,
at the court of the duchesse du Maine, where she contracted
a close friendship with the president Hénault. In Paris she
was in a sense the rival of Madame Geoffrin, but the members
of her salon were drawn from aristocratic society more than from
literary cliques. There were, however, exceptions. Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Fontenelle and Madame de Staal-Delaunay were
among the habitués. When Hénault introduced D’Alembert,
Madame du Deffand was at once captivated by him. With the
encyclopaedists she was never in sympathy, and appears to have
tolerated them only for his sake. In 1752 she retired from Paris,
intending to spend the rest of her days in the country, but she
was persuaded by her friends to return. She had taken up her
abode in 1747 in apartments in the convent of St Joseph in the
rue St Dominique, which had a separate entrance from the street.
When she lost her sight in 1754 she engaged Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse to help her in entertaining. This lady’s wit made
some of the guests, D’Alembert among others, prefer her society
to that of Madame du Deffand, and she arranged to receive her
friends for an hour before the appearance of her patron. When
this state of things was discovered Mademoiselle de Lespinasse
was dismissed (1764), but the salon was broken up, for she took
with her D’Alembert, Turgot and the literary clique generally.
From this time Madame du Deffand very rarely received any
literary men. The principal friendships of her later years were
with the duchesse de Choiseul and with Horace Walpole. Her
affection for the latter, which dated from 1765, was the strongest
and most durable of all her attachments. Under the stress of
this tardy passion she developed qualities of style and eloquence
of which her earlier writings had given little promise. In the
opinion of Sainte-Beuve the prose of her letters ranks with that
of Voltaire as the best of that classical epoch without excepting
any even of the great writers. Walpole refused at first to acknowledge
the closeness of their intimacy from an exaggerated
fear of the ridicule attaching to her age, but he paid several
visits to Paris expressly for the purpose of enjoying her society,
and maintained a close and most interesting correspondence
with her for fifteen years. She died on the 23rd of September
1780, leaving her dog Tonton to the care of Walpole, who
was also entrusted with her papers. Of her innumerable witty
sayings the best known is her remark on the cardinal de
Polignac’s account of St Denis’s miraculous walk of two miles
with his head in his hands,—Il n’y a que le premier pas qui
coûte.
The Correspondance inédite of Madame du Deffand with D’Alembert, Hénault, Montesquieu, and others was published in Paris (2 vols.) in 1809. Letters of the marquise du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, afterwards earl of Orford, from the year 1766 to the year 1780 (4 vols.), edited, with a biographical sketch, by Miss Mary Berry, were published in London from the originals at Strawberry Hill in 1810.
The standard edition of her letters is the Correspondance complète de la marquise du Deffand . . . by M. de Lescure (1865); the Correspondance inédite with M. and Mme de Choiseul and others was edited in 1859 and again in 1866 by the marquis de Ste-Aulaire. Other papers of Madame du Deffand obtained at the breaking up of Walpole’s collection are in private hands. Madame du Deffand returned many of Walpole’s letters at his request, and subsequently destroyed those which she received from him. Those in his possession appear to have been destroyed after his death by Miss Berry, who printed fragments from them as footnotes to the edition of 1810. The correspondence between Walpole and Madame du Deffand thus remains one-sided, but seven of Walpole’s letters to her are printed for the first time in the edition (1903) of his correspondence by Mrs Paget Toynbee, who discovered a quantity of her unedited letters. See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vols. i. and xiv.; and the notice by M. de Lescure in his edition of the correspondence.
DEFIANCE, a city and the county seat of Defiance county,
Ohio, U.S.A., at the confluence of the Auglaize and Tiffin rivers
with the Maumee, about 50 m. S.W. of Toledo. Pop. (1890)
7694; (1900) 7579 (960 foreign-born); (1910) 7327. It is served
by the Baltimore & Ohio and the Wabash railways, and by the
Ohio Electric railway to Lima (42 m.). The city commands a fine
view of the rivers and the surrounding country, which is well
adapted to agriculture; and has large machine shops and several
flour mills, besides manufactories of agricultural implements,
waggons, sashes and blinds, and wood-working machinery for the
manufacture of artillery wheels. Here, too, is Defiance College,
an institution of the Christian Denomination, opened in 1885.
Defiance was long the site of an Indian village. In 1794 General
Anthony Wayne built a fort here and named it Defiance. In 1822
Defiance was laid out as a town; in 1845 it was made the county
seat of the newly erected county; and in 1881 it became a city of
the second class.
DEFILE, a military expression for a passage, to march through
which troops are compelled to “defile,” or narrow their front
(from the Fr. défiler, to march in a line, or by “files”). The word
is usually applied to a ravine or gorge in a range of hills, but a
causeway over a river, a bridge and even a village may equally
be called a defile. The term is also used to express, without any
special reference to military operations, a gorge in mountains.
The verb “to defile” is used of troops marching on a narrow
front, or narrowing their front, under all circumstances, and in
this sense is the contrary of “deploy.”
“Defile,” in the sense of “pollute,” is another form of “defoul”; though spelt alike, the two words are pronounced differently, the accent being on the first syllable for the former and on the second for the latter.
DEFINITION (Lat. definitio, from de-finire, to set limits to,
describe), a logical term used popularly for the process of explaining,
or giving the meaning of, a word, and also in the concrete
for the proposition or statement in which that explanation
is expressed. In logic, definition consists in determining the
qualities which belong to given concepts or universals; it is not
concerned with individuals, which are marked by an infinity
of peculiarities, any one or all of which might be predicated of
another individual. Individuals can be defined only in so far as
they belong to a single kind. According to Aristotle, definition is
the statement of the essence of a concept (ὁρισμὸς μὲν γὰρ τοῦ τί ἐστι καὶ οὐσίας, Posterior Analytics, B iii. 90 b 30); that is,
it consists of the genus and the differentia. In other words,
“man” is defined as “animal plus rationality,” or “rational
animal,”[1] i.e. the concept is (1) referred to the next higher genus,
and (2) distinguished from other modes in which that genus
exists, i.e. from other species. It is sometimes argued that, there
being no definition of individuals as such, definition is of names
(see J. S. Mill, Logic, i. viii. 5), not of things; it is generally,
however, maintained that definition is of things, regarded as, or
- ↑ “Rational animal” is thus the predicate of the statement constituting the definition. Sometimes the word “definition” is used to signify merely the predicate.
