when the two, to avenge the wrong, made away with Itys, Tereus'
son, and served him up to his father at a banquet; the fury of Tereus on
the discovery knew no bounds, but they escaped his vengeance, Philomela
by being changed into a nightingale and Progne into a swallow.

PHILOPOEMON, the head of the Achaecan League, born at Megalopolis,
and the last of the Greek heroes; fought hard to achieve the independence
of Greece, but having to struggle against heavy odds, was overpowered;
rose from a sick-bed to suppress a revolt, was taken prisoner, thrown
into a dungeon, and forced to drink poison (252-183 B.C.).

PHILOSOPHE, name for a philosopher of the school of 18th century
Enlightenment, represented by the ENCYCLOPEDISTS (q. v.) of France; the
class have been characterised by the delight they took in outraging the
religious sentiment. See AUFKLAeRUNG and ILLUMINATION, THE.

PHILOSOPHER'S STONE was, with the Elixir of Life, the object of the
search of the mediaeval alchemists. Their theory regarded gold as the most
perfect metal, all others being removed from it by various stages of
imperfection, and they sought an amalgam of pure sulphur and pure
mercury, which, being more perfect still than gold, would transmute the
baser metals into the nobler.

PHILOSOPHISM, FRENCH, a philosophy such as the philosophers of
France gave instances of, founded on the notion and cultivated in the
belief that scientific knowledge is the sovereign remedy for the ills of
life, summed up in two articles--first, that "a lie cannot be believed";
and second, that "in spiritual supersensual matters no belief is
possible," her boast being that "she had destroyed religion by
extinguishing the abomination" (_l'Infame_).

PHILOSOPHY, the science of sciences or of things in general,
properly an attempt to find the absolute in the contingent, the immutable
in the mutable, the universal in the particular, the eternal in the
temporal, the real in the phenomenal, the ideal in the real, or in other
words, to discover "the single principle that," as Dr. Stirling says,
"possesses within itself the capability of transition into all existent
variety and varieties," which it presupposes can be done not by induction
from the transient, but by deduction from the permanent as that
spiritually reveals itself in the creating mind, so that a _Philosopher_
is a man who has, as Carlyle says, quoting Goethe, "stationed himself in
the middle (between the oute