PERSONAL PROPERTY 



PERSPECTIVE 



man, pleading his personal liberty, may declare 

 his right to drink liquor; his employers deny 

 him that right, because patrons of their train 

 sen-ice have , right to clear-brained, intelligent 

 service. 



When personal liberty passes the point where 

 it has due regard for the rights of others it 

 becomes license. It was this fact that caused 

 Madame Roland to exclaim: 



O liberty ! liberty ! how many crimes are com- 

 mitted in thy name ! 



The cry of personal liberty is frequently 

 raised by opponents of prohibition laws, but 

 the belief of the majority who have imposed 

 such restraints is that the rights of the entire 

 community are higher than the desires of the 

 individual. The more one considers the "do 

 as you please" principle the more evident it 

 becomes that no man lives unto himself. 



PERSONAL PROPERTY. All property is 

 divided into two general classes, real property 

 and personal property. Real property includes 

 lands, including houses, trees and all other im- 

 movable objects thereon; personal property in- 

 cludes all other propert}^. Live stock, farm 

 implements, and crops that have been har- 

 vested are good examples of personal property ; 

 money, a merchant's goods and promissory notes 

 are other examples. Real property cannot be 

 transferred except by written contracts (see 

 DEED), but personal property can be transferred 

 by verbal contract. Buying a pair of shoes 

 and paying money for them is a good example 

 of transfer of personal property. In most states 

 real property descends to the heirs on the death 

 of the owner, but the personal property passes 

 into the hands of the administrator of the 

 estate, who sells it and divides the proceeds 

 among the heirs, unless provision is made for 

 its disposal by will. See CONTRACT; REAL ES- 

 TATE. 



Consult Brantley's Principles of the Law of 

 Personal Property; Pollock and Wright's Posses- 

 sion. 



PERSONIFICATION, per sahnifika' shun, a 

 figure in rhetoric in which life is attributed to 

 inanimate objects or to abstract notions. The 

 Psalmist, in Psalms XIX, 1, used personification 

 when he wrote, "The heavens declare the glory 

 of God." In Thomas Gray's Elegy there are 

 two examples of personification in the lines 

 Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, 

 And Melancholy marked him for her own. 



Personification cannot always be distin- 

 guished from metaphor, which is founded on 

 the resemblance of one thing to another. Such 



an expression as the raging sea, for example, 

 could be considered as either metaphor or per- 

 sonification, for the sea is likened to a wild 

 beast (implied comparison) and it is also en- 

 dowed v.'ith life and action. See FIGURE OF 

 SPEECH; METAPHOR. 



PERSPECTIVE, per upek' tiv, the art of 

 representing objects upon a plane surface, not 

 as they are, but as they appear in space to the 

 eye. The science of perspective is based upon 

 certain fundamental facts. One of these is the 

 apparent decrease in the size of an object as the 

 distance between it and the observer increases. 

 For example, a ship seems to grow smaller and 

 smaller as it sails away from harbor, and the 

 apparent decrease in size continues until it is 

 lost to sight. Another basic fact is the ap- 

 parent gradual decrease in size of objects of 

 like dimension which stand at different dis- 

 tances from the observer. This is illustrated 

 by Fig. 1, which shows a line of telegraph 



FIG. 1 



poles. To an observer, the first pole in a row 

 seems the largest, and each of the others ap- 

 pears to be slightly smaller than the one 

 ahead of it. Again, two parallel lines of poles 

 or the two parallel rails of a railway track ap- 

 pear to converge as they recede from the eye, 

 and finally to meet at the vanishing point. 

 The appearance of objects is also affected by 

 the position of the observer; that is, according 

 to whether the objects are on a level with the 

 eye, or are above or below it. 



The rules for perspective can be easily under- 

 stood by studying a cube, book, or other simi- 

 lar object (see Fig. 2). All of the lines (form- 

 ing the edges) which have the same direction 

 belong to a group, or system; each line is an 

 element of the system. Each system has its 

 own vanishing point, and all the lines of a 

 system seem to converge toward the vanishing 



