The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 137

COMPIeGNE (14), a quiet old town in the dep. of Oise, 50 m. NE. of Paris; has some fine old churches, but the chief edifice is the palace, built by St. Louis and rebuilt by Louis XIV., where the marriage of Napoleon to Maria Louisa was celebrated; here Joan of Arc was made prisoner in 1430, and Louis Napoleon had hunting ground.

COMPTON, HENRY, bishop of London, son of the Earl of Northampton; fought bravely for Charles I.; was colonel of dragoons at the Restoration; left the army for the Church; was made bishop; crowned William and Mary when the archbishop, Sancroft, refused; _d_. 1713.

COMRIE (8), a village in Perths.h.i.+re, on the Earn, 20 m. W. of Perth, in a beautiful district of country; subject to earthquakes from time to time; birthplace of George Gilfillan.

COMTE, AUGUSTE, a French philosopher, born at Montpellier, the founder of POSITIVISM (q. v.); enough to say here, it consisted of a new arrangement of the sciences into Abstract and Concrete, and a new law of historical evolution in science from a theological through a metaphysical to a positive stage, which last is the ultimate and crowning and alone legitimate method, that is, observation of phenomena and their sequence; Comte was first a disciple of St. Simon, but he quarrelled with him; commenced a "Cours de Philosophie Positive" of his own, in six vols.; but finding it defective on the moral side, he inst.i.tuted a wors.h.i.+p of humanity, and gave himself out as the chief priest of a new religion, a very different thing from Carlyle's hero-wors.h.i.+p (1795-1857).

COMUS, the Roman deity who presided over festive revelries; the t.i.tle of a poem by Milton, "the most exquisite of English or any masks."

COMYN, JOHN (the Black Comyn), Lord of Badenoch, a Scottish n.o.ble of French descent, his ancestor, born at Comines, having come over with the Conqueror and got lands given him; was one of the compet.i.tors for the Scottish crown in 1291, and lost it.

COMYN, JOHN (the Red Comyn), son of the preceding; as one of the three Wardens of Scotland defended it against the English, whom he defeated at Roslin; but in 1304 submitted to Edward I., and falling under suspicion of Bruce, was stabbed by him in a monastery at Dumfries in 1306.

CONCEPCION (24), a town in Chile, S. of Valparaiso, with its port, Talcahuano, 7 m. off, one of the safest and most commodious in the country, and ranks next to Valparaiso as a trading centre.

CONCEPTION OF OUR LADY, an order of nuns founded in Portugal in 1484; at first followed the rule of the Cistercians, but afterwards that of St. Clare.

CONCIERGERIE, a prison in the Palais de Justice, Paris.

CONCLAVE, properly the room, generally in the Vatican, where the cardinals are confined under lock and key while electing a Pope.

CONCORD, a town in U.S., 23 m. NW. of Boston; was the residence of Emerson, Th.o.r.eau, and Hawthorne; here the first engagement took place in the American war in 1775.

CONCORD (17), capital of New Hamps.h.i.+re, U.S., a thriving trading place.

CONCORDAT, THE, a convention of July 15, 1801, between Bonaparte and Pius V., regulative of the relations of France with the Holy See.

CONCORDE, PLACE DE LA, a celebrated public place, formed by Louis XV. in 1748, adorned by a statue of him; at the Revolution it was called Place de la Revolution; here Louis XVI. and his queen were guillotined.

CONCORDIA, the Roman G.o.ddess of peace, to whom Camillus the dictator in 367 B.C. dedicated a temple on the conclusion of the strife between the patricians and plebeians.

CONDe, HENRY I., PRINCE OF, fought in the ranks of the Huguenots, but escaped the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew by an oath of abjuration (1552-1588).

CONDe, HOUSE OF, a collateral branch of the house of Bourbon, the members of which played all along a conspicuous role in the history of France.

CONDe, LOUIS I., PRINCE OF, founder of the house of Conde, a brave, gallant man, though deformed; distinguished himself in the wars between Henry II. and Charles V., particularly in the defence of Metz; affronted at court, and obnoxious to the Guises, he became a Protestant, and joined his brother the king of Navarre; became the head of the party, and was treacherously killed after the battle of Jarnac; he had been party, however, to the conspiracy of Amboise, which aimed a death-blow at the Guises (1530-1569).

CONDe, LOUIS II., PRINCE OF, named "the Great Conde," born at Paris; was carefully educated; acquired a taste for literature, which stood him in good stead at the end of his career; made his reputation by his victory over the Spaniards at Recroi; distinguished himself at Fribourg, Nordlingen, and Lens; the settlement of the troubles of the Fronde alienated him, so that he entered the service of Spain, and served against his country, but was by-and-by reconciled; led the French army to success in Franche-Comte and Holland, and soon after retired to Chantilly, where he enjoyed the society of such men as Moliere, Boileau, and La Bruyere, and when he died Bossuet p.r.o.nounced a funeral oration over his grave (1621-1686).

CONDe, LOUIS JOSEPH, PRINCE DE, born at Chantilly; served in the Seven Years' War; attended in the antechamber in the palace when Louis XV. lay dying; was one of the first to emigrate on the fall of the Bastille; seized every opportunity to save the monarchy; was declared a traitor to the country, and had his estates confiscated for threatening to restore Louis XVI.; organised troops to aid in the Restoration; settled at Malmesbury, in England, during the Empire; returned to France with Louis XVIII. (1736-1818).

CONDILLAC, eTIENNE BONNOT, a French philosopher, born at Gren.o.ble, of good birth; commenced as a disciple of Locke, but went further, for whereas Locke was content to deduce empirical knowledge from sensation and reflection, he deduced reflection from sensation, and laid the foundation of a sensationalism which, in the hands of his successors, went further still, and swamped the internal in the external, and which is now approaching the stage of self-cancelling zero; he lived as a recluse, and had Rousseau and Diderot for intimate friends (1715-1780).

CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY, the doctrine that only believers in Christ have any future existence, a dogma founded on certain isolated pa.s.sages of Scripture.

CONDORCET, MARQUIS DE, a French mathematician and philosopher, born near St. Quentin; contributed to the "Encyclopedie"; was of the Encyclopedist school; took sides with the Revolutionary party in the interest of progress; voted with the Girondists usually; suspected by the extreme party; was not safe even under concealment; "skulked round Paris in thickets and stone-quarries; entered a tavern one bleared May morning, ragged, rough-bearded, hunger-stricken, and asked for breakfast; having a Latin Horace about him was suspected and haled to prison, breakfast unfinished; fainted by the way with exhaustion; was flung into a damp cell, and found next morning lying dead on the floor"; his works are voluminous, and the best known is his "Exquisse du Progres de l'Esprit Humain"; he was not an original thinker, but a clear expositor (1743-1794).

CONDOTTIE'RI, leaders of Italian free-lances, who in the 14th and 15th centuries lived by plunder or hired themselves to others for a share in the spoils.

CONFEDERATE STATES, 11 Southern States of the American Union, which seceded in 1861 on the question of slavery, and which occasioned a civil war that lasted till 1865.

CONFEDERATION OF THE RHINE, a confederation of 16 German States, which in 1806 dissolved their connection with Germany and leagued with France, and which lasted till disaster overtook Napoleon in Russia, and then broke up; the Germanic Confederation, or union of all the States, took its place, till it too was dissolved by the defeat of Austria in 1866, and which gave ascendency to Prussia and ensured the erection of the German empire on its ruins.

CONFERENCE, a stated meeting of Wesleyan ministers for the transaction of the business of their Church.

CONFESSIONS OF FAITH, are statements of doctrine very similar to Creeds, but usually longer and polemical, as well as didactic; they are in the main, though not exclusively, a.s.sociated with Protestantism; the 16th century produced many, including the _Sixty-seven Articles_ of the Swiss reformers, drawn up by Zwingli in 1523; the _Augsburg Confession_ of 1530, the work of Luther and Melanchthon, which marked the breach with Rome; the _Tetrapolitan Confession_ of the German Reformed Church, 1530; the _Gallican Confession_, 1559; and the _Belgic Confession_ of 1561. In Britain the _Scots Confession_, drawn up by John Knox in 1560; the _Thirty-nine Articles_ of the Church of England in 1562; the _Irish Articles_ in 1615; and the _Westminster Confession of Faith_ in 1647; this last, the work of the Westminster a.s.sembly of Divines, has by its force of language, logical statement, comprehensiveness, and dependence on Scripture, commended itself to the Presbyterian Churches of all English-speaking peoples, and is the most widely recognised Protestant statement of doctrine; it has as yet been modified only by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which adopted a Declaratory Statement regarding certain of its doctrines in 1879, and by the Free Church of Scotland, which adopted a similar statement in 1890.

CONFESSIONS OF ROUSSEAU, memoirs published after his death in 1788, in which that writer makes confession of much that was good in him and much that was bad.

CONFESSIONS OF ST. AUGUSTINE, an account which that Father of the Church gives of the errors of his youth and his subsequent conversion.

CONFUCIUS, the Latin form of the name of the great sage of China, Kung Futsze, and the founder of a religion which is based on the wors.h.i.+p and practice of morality as exemplified in the lives and teachings of the wise men who have gone before, and who, as he conceived, have made the world what it is, and have left it to posterity to build upon the same basis; while he lived he was held in greater and greater honour by mult.i.tudes of disciples, till on his death he became an object of wors.h.i.+p, and even his descendants came to be regarded as a kind of sacred caste; he flourished about 550 B.C.

CONGe D'eLIRE, a warrant granted by the Crown to the dean and chapter of a cathedral to elect a particular bishop to a vacant see.

CONGO, the second in length and largest in volume of the African rivers, rises NE. of the Muchinga Mountains in Rhodesia, flows SW.