RELIGION, EDUCATION, FINE ARTS. 



569 



from the inscriptions on them, which indicate 

 the above time. The material of which 

 they were cut is granite, brought from Syene, 

 near the first cataract of the Nile. Two cen- 

 turies after their erection Rameses IT. had the 

 stones nearly covered with carving setting 

 out his own greatness and achievements. 

 Twenty-three years before Christ, Augustus 

 Caesar moved the obelisks from Heliopolis to 

 Alexandria and set them up in the Caesarium, 

 a palace, which now stands, a mere mass of 

 ruins, near the station of the railroad to 

 Cairo. In 1819 one of these obelisks was pre- 

 sented by the Egyptian government to Eng- 

 land, but, as no one knew how to move them, 

 it was not taken to London until 1878. 

 Subsequently the other obelisk was presented 

 to the United States. 



Parthenon, a celebrated temple at Athens, 

 on the summit of the Acropolis, and sacred to 

 Minerva. The Parthenon in beauty and 

 grandeur surpassed all other buildings of the 

 kind, and was constructed entirely of Pentelic 

 marble. It was built during the splendid era 

 of Pericles, and the expense of its erection was 

 estimated at 6,000 talents. It contained in- 

 numerable statues raised upon marble pedes- 

 tals, and other works of art. The colossal 

 statue of Minerva, which was in the eastern 

 end of the temple, was thirty-nine feet high, 

 and was composed of ivory and gold, the value 

 of the latter being forty-four talents, or about 

 $465, 000. The temple was reduced to ruins 

 in 1687. A part of the matchless friezes, 

 statues, etc., of the Parthenon now form the 

 most valuable and interesting portion of the 

 British Museum, they having been taken from 

 the temple by Lord Elgin in 1800, and by him 

 sold to the British Government. 



German Philosophers. Leibnitz, the 

 founder of modern German philosophy, was a 

 marvelous specimen of precocious genius, his 

 first philosophical treatise being written at the 

 age of seventeen. His system of philosophy 

 supposed the mind and body to be two distinct 

 machines, acting independently of but in har- 

 mony with each other. He also held to the 

 theory of " monads " that is, the indestruc- 

 tible entities of matter and of mind - claiming 

 the Deity to be the prime monad, and asserted 

 that all ideas were innate. He lived from 

 1646 to 1716. The great opponent of Leibnitz 

 was Christian Wolf, who founded all his 

 philosophy on logical propositions, and set 

 aside those very doctrines on which Leibnitz 

 grounded all his reasoning. After these two 

 philosophers had passed away there was a 

 term of quiescence in German philosophy, 

 broken by the teachings of Emanuel Kant, the 

 philosopher of " Pure Reason," and the father 



of modern philosophical criticism. The cen- 

 tral point of his system lies in the proposition 

 that before we can know anything concerning 

 objects we must understand how we perceive 

 objects, and what degree of knowledge percep- 

 tion can give us. Fichte was a disciple of 

 Kant, but went beyond his master in trans- 

 forming all knowledge into pure idealism. 

 Schelling was the next writer to gain a general 

 influence. He was at first simply an ex- 

 pounder of Fichte, but gradually developed a 

 philosophy of his own, founded on the theory 

 that the true sources of knowledge are not 

 experience or reflection, but intellectual in- 

 tuition. Hegel, who succeeded Schelling as 

 the leader in German philosophy, was a more 

 vigorous and logical thinker. The foundation 

 of his system is that the union of assertion 

 and negation, the harmonizing of every propo- 

 sition with its contradictory, is the source of 

 all knowledge. The Hegelian system has been 

 modified largely by the speculations of Schleier- 

 macher, Schubert, and others, but it still re- 

 mains the most powerful school of German 

 philosophy. The principal opposing system 

 is that of Schopenhauer, whose fundamental 

 doctrine is that the only essential reality in the 

 universe is trill, all phenomena being but 

 manifestations of the single original will. 



Classification of Mankind. In re- 

 gard to religion, mankind maybe divided into 

 two general classes : Monotheistic, those who 

 worship one god, and polytheistic, those who 

 worship more than one god, also called pagans, 

 or heathen. Of the first class we have : (1) 

 the Christian, which recognizes the Bible as the 

 revealed word of God, and Jesus Christ as 

 the Son of God ; (2) the Jewish, which rec- 

 ognizes the Old Testament as the word of 

 God, but does not acknowledge Christ ; (3) 

 the Mohammedan, or the religion of Islam, 

 whose two articles of faith are, " There is no 

 god but God, and Mohammed is the prophet 

 of God." 



Of the second class there are : (1) Brah- 

 minism, or Hindooism, the religion of the peo- 

 ple of India, a very ancient religion which has 

 many good moral doctrines, but strange ideas 

 of a future state ; (2) Buddhism, an offshoot of 

 Brahminism, now practiced by the people of 

 China and Japan, founded by Sakya-Muni, 

 who adopted the title of Buddha (the enlight- 

 ened), a religion which has been more en- 

 thusiastic in making converts than any other, 

 except Christianity, and has many good moral 

 precepts, but is practically atheistic ; (8) Fetich- 

 ism, a very low form of superstition, which 

 consists in the worship of material objects, 

 either living or dead, as animals or idols of 

 wood or stone. 



