Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/587

R I P_R I 567 Talmud (see RASHI) RASHBAM (q.v.) was utilized. Riph was not only a great Talmudist, but also a man of the greatest magnanimity and highest morality, as may be seen from the following two facts. When R. Yishak Ibn Albalia, who had been his bitterest enemy, lay at the point of death, he recommended his son to Riph, who received him with the greatest kindness, and at once adopted him as son. 1 Again, when Riph himself was at the point of death he recommended to the congregation of Lucena for successor, not his own learned and virtuous son Ya'akob, but the yet more learned, though not more virtuous, R. Yoseph Ibn Migash, 2 who became the teacher of the teachers of MAIMOKIDES (q.v.). Although Riph's works which are known are only two, the editions of one of these and the commentaries thereon are very numerous ; we can only mention a few of them. I. Hilekhoth Rob Al-phez. (1) With the Novellas, of Rabbenu Nissimb. Reuben, the Decisions of R. Mordekhaib. Hillel (seeRosn), the Novellas of one of the disciples of Rabbenu Yonah, the com- mentaries of R. Yehonathan Hakkohen of Lunel and R. Yoseph Habibo (Constantinople, 1509, fol.). (2) The second edition we liave already mentioned. (3) With the Strictures by R. Zerahyah Hallevi (author of the Maor) and ISTachmanides's defence called Milhamoth Adonai (see RAMBAN), &c. (Venice, 1552, fol.). Each subsequent edition contains additional matter. II. Responsa, originally some, if not all of them, written in Arabic (Leghorn, 1781, and reprint, Vienna 1794, both in 4to). For more literature by andon Riph see Temim Se'im in the collection Turn- math Yesharim. (S. M. S.-S.) RIPLEY, a well-built market town of Derbyshire, situ- ated near the river Derwent and the Cromford Canal, and on a branch line of the Midland Railway 10 miles north of Derby and 10 south of Chesterfield. The principal public building is the market-hall erected in 1880. In" the neighbourhood there are extensive collieries, and coke is largely manufactured. Besides the large concern of the Butterley Iron Company, which includes foundries, blast furnaces, and boiler works, the town possesses silk and cotton mills. The charter for the market was granted by Henry III. The population of the urban sanitary district (area 1211 acres) in 1871 was 5639, and in 1881 it was 6087. RIPLEY, GEORGE (1802-1880), critic and man of letters, was born at Greenfield, in western Massachusetts, on October 3, 1802. He was educated at local schools and at Harvard College, where he took his degree in 1823, ranking first in his class, and then studying theology was in 1826 ordained pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston. Here his success as a thoughtful preacher was marked ; but in 1840 he resigned his charge, and he subsequently retired from the active ministry altogether. It was during those years that there grew up in New England that form of thought or philosophy known as Transcendentalism a name, as Emerson said, " given no- body knows by whom, or when it was applied." Its growth was part of what Dr Holmes has termed the " in- tellectual or, if we may call it so, spiritual revival " which during the period from 1820 to 1840 was so strongly marked in the New England "churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in literature." Ripley was prominent, if not the leader, in all practical manifestations of the movement; and it was by his earnestness and practical energy that certain of its more tangible results were directed. The first meeting of the Transcendental Club was held at his house in September 1836. He was a founder and a chief supporter of the famous magazine The Dial, which was the organ of the school from 1840 to 1844. Most important of all, however, he was the originator and conductor of an experiment which was the most interesting practical result of the thought and ten- 1 See Sepher Hakkabbalah of RABAD II. (q.v.}. 2 See Hemdah Genuzah (Konigsberg, 1856, 8vo), leaf 30a. dencies of the time, the foundation of " The Brook Farm Association for Education and Agriculture." This project, in the words of its originator, was intended " to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labour than now exists ; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual ; to guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing all with labour adapted to their tastes and talents, an<i securing to them the fruits of their industry ; to do away with the necessity of menial services by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labour to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions." In short, its aim was to bring about the best conditions for an ideal civilization, reducing to a minimum the labour necessary for mere existence, and by this and by the simplicity of its social machinery saving the maximum of time for mental and spiritual education and development. At a time when Emerson could write to Carlyle, " We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket," the Brook Farm project certainly did not appear as impossible a scheme as many others that were in the air. At all events it enlisted the co-operation of men whose subse- quent careers show them to have been something more than visionaries. The association bought a tract of land in West Roxbury, some ten miles from Boston, and with about twenty members actually began its enterprise in the summer of 1841. For three years the undertaking went on quietly and simply, subject to few outward troubles other than financial difficulties, the number of associates increasing to seventy or eighty. Pictures of the life they led have been preserved by many hands. It was during this period that Haw- thorne had his short experience of Brook Farm, of which so many suggestions appear in the JBlithedale Romance, though his preface to later editions effectually disposed of the idea which gave him great pain that he had either drawn his characters from persons there, or had meant to give any actual description of the colony. Emerson, though he refused in a kind and characteristic letter to join in the undertaking, and though he afterwards wrote of Brook Farm with not uncharitable humour as- "a per- petual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan," yet spoke of the design as " noble and generous," and among its founders were many of his near friends. In 1844 the growing need of a more scientific organiza- tion, and the influence which Fourier's doctrines had gained in the minds of Ripley and many of his associates, combined to change the whole plan of the community. It was transformed, with the strong approval of all its chief members and the consent of the rest, into a Fourierist "phalanx" in 1845. There was an accession of new members, a momentary increase of prosperity, a brilliant new undertaking in the publication of a journal, The Har- binger, in which Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Francis G. Shaw, and John D wight were the chief writers, and to which Lowell, Whittier, George William Curtis, Parke Godwin, Story, Channing, Higginson, Horace Greeley, and many more now and then contributed. But the individu- ality of the old Brook Farm was gone. The association was not rescued even from financial troubles by the change. With increasing difficulty it kept on till the spring of 1846, when a fire which destroyed its building or " phalanstery " brought losses which caused, or certainly gave the final ostensible reason for, its dissolution. Its failure left Ripley poor and feeling keenly the defeat of