Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/54

ABSINTH ABSOLUTE blood, and cold or warm applications, as the case may demand. Should these means fail, poultices must be used to promote suppuration. The matter may be evacuated by incision, or in certain cases be allowed to make an exit for itself. In a chronic abscess the pain, redness, increased temperature, and fever are often ab- sent, and hence it is also known as cold abscess. In most cases its progress is slow, and it may remain for a long time without increase in size, or any tendency to open through the skin. Indeed, in some instances it may disappear by a process of absorption. Usually, however, it is necessary to open it, which may be done by cutting directly into the cavity, or by what is known as subcutaneous incision, the knife be- ing passed for some distance beneath the skin before it enters the abscess. This latter pro- cedure is made use of in order to prevent the admission of air, which in some cases excites an amount of suppuration sufficient to exhaust the patient. Besides acute and chronic, ab- scesses are spoken of as being " by congestion " when the matter, usually dependent on caries, makes its appearance at some distance from the diseased part; as "idiopathic," when the cause is not known, &c. ABSINTH, or Wormwood, the tops and leaves of artemisia absinthium, a plant of the order composites and tribe senecionideas. It contains a volatile oil and a very bitter, resinous sub- stance called absinthino. It has been used as an aromatic, bitter tonic, and anthelmintic. It derives its chief importance from being a con- stituent of the French liqueur called absinthe. This consists of alcohol holding in solution the active principles, mostly volatile oils, of seve- ral aromatic plants besides wormwood. The precipitation of these oils, when the liqueur is added to water, produces whitening or cloud- ing. The continued use of absinthe has been found to give rise in man to symptoms of an epileptic character, not altogether attributable to the alcohol it contains. Experiments have shown that the essence of absinth, in a single large dose, may cause epileptiform convulsions in animals. The brain disease produced by this drug is considered incurable, though tem- porary respites may occur. ABSOLON, John, an English painter, born in London, May 6, 1815. He is a member of the "New Water Color Society," to the annual exhibitions of which he is still a steady con- tributor. He paints history and genre with equal facility, and is known as an accomplished draughtsman and colorist. He has attempted oil painting with success, but his special field is water-color drawing. ABSOLUTE (Lat. absolutu*, absolved, freed from all extrinsic conditions, complete in itself, and dependent on no other cause), a term much used in modern philosophy, especially by Schelling, Hegel, Cousin, and their follow- ers. As used by them it stands opposed to the relative, for independent, unconditioned, self-existent being, or being in itself, which they contend is the primitive in all thought, and the ultimate in all science, and the object of immediate intuition. In their language the absolute means, or is intended to mean, the Infinite, God himself, regarded simply as pure being, Das reine Seyn. Sir William Hamilton denies that absolute and infinite are identical, and that in the sense of the infinite the un- conditioned the absolute is an object of intui- tion. He confines all philosophy, therefore, to the finite, the relative, the conditioned. To think, he says, is to condition, and there is no intuition without thought. The absolute and relative can be thought only as correlatives, each connoting the other, and, therefore, only as conditioned. He is answered by those who profess the philosophy of the absolute, that, although the term may be used to express an idea different from that of the unconditioned, or the infinite, and although to think is, in a cer- tain sense, to condition, yet the condition is, in the thought itself, always apprehended as the condition of the subject, never as the con- dition of the object. Certainly the finite can apprehend the infinite only in a finite mode or manner, but to apprehend it even in a finite mode or manner is still to apprehend the infinite. It is not necessary to the reality of human knowl- edge that it should be adequate to the object, for if it were there could be no human knowl- edge at all. They reply further, that the rel- ative is inconceivable without the absolute. What is not, is not intelligible ; and since the relative is not and cannot be without the abso- lute, the conditioned without the uncondi- tioned, there can be no intuition of the former without a simultaneous intuition of the latter, nor are they intuitively apprehended precisely as correlatives, each as conditioned by the other; for in the intuition itself the absolute is apprehended as the cause or creator of the relative, the unconditioned as conditioning the conditioned. There is another controversy even among those who are termed ontologists, and who profess to find in the intuition of un- conditioned being the principle of philosophy whether the pure being, the absolute, the un- conditioned being, asserted by Cousin and the German school, and which they identify, or at- tempt to identify, with God, is real living be- ing, real living God, or after all only a logical abstraction. A class of modern philosophers, among whom may be mentioned Vincenzo Gioberti as the most distinguished, maintain that, as the terms the absolute, the infinite, the unconditioned are evidently abstract terms, the idea they express is and can be only a logi- cal abstraction, formed by the mind operating upon its own conception, and eliminating from them all conception of space, time, bounds, conditions, or relativity. In this case, they say, it is no real being, but a simple generaliza- tion of psychological phenomena, and as far removed from the ens necessarium et reale, the real and necessary being of the schoolmen, the real living God, in whom the human race be-