Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/405

 SIEYES

SIMON

had always supported &quot; the true Protestant religion.&quot; Burnet (History of His Own Time, ii, 352) throws sufficient light on this when he says : &quot; He seemed to be a Christian, but in a particular form of his own. He thought it was to be like a divine philosophy in the mind, but he was against all public worship and everything that looked like a Church.&quot; He was, in fact, an early and very high-minded Deist. On the scaffold he &quot; refused the aid of the ministers of religion &quot; (Lingard, x, 87). He was executed on Dec. 7, 1683.

SIEYES, Count Emmanuel Joseph,

French statesman. B. May 3, 1748. Ed. by Jesuits and at a Paris seminary. Sieyes reluctantly followed his parents wishes in entering the clergy. He was for a time a Canon in Brittany, then Vicar General to the Bishop of Chartres, and member of the Higher Council of the French clergy. But he &quot; evaded every occasion of clerical work,&quot; he says, as he had studied Locke and Condillac at Paris and become a Eationalist. In 1788 he represented his order in the Provincial Assembly at Orleans. He at once threw off his orders and embraced the Eevolution when it broke out. It was Sieyes who wrote the famous pamphlet Qu est-ce que le tiers etat ? (1789). He had great influence in the National Assembly, and drew up the Tennis Court Oath. A further pamphlet of his, Eeconnaissance et exposition des droits de I homme (July, 1789), was the first sketch of the Declaration of the Eights of Man. He passed to the Convention, but retired into obscurity after the horrors of 1793. Later he was a leader of the moderates in the Council of Five Hundred, and in 1798 he was sent as plenipotentiary minister to Berlin. Under Napoleon, who made him Count and Senator, he was one of the chief authors of the new Constitution. At theEestoration he was banished to Brussels; but he returned to France after the 1830 Eevolution, and was admitted to the Academy. Sieyes never returned to the Church. D. June 20, 1836.

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SIMCOX, Edith, writer. B. 1844. Miss Simcox contributed a Eationalistic volume, Natural Law (1877), to &quot; The English and Foreign Philosophical Library.&quot; She traced the natural evolution of man and his ideas. She had, under the pseudonym &quot; H. Law- renny,&quot; previously criticized Theistic argu ments in the Fortnightly Eeview (1872). Later she published Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers (1882) and Primi tive Civilizations (2 vols., 1894 a substan tial work on anthropology). D. 1901.

SIMCOX, George Augustus, M.A., poet. B. 1841. Ed. Oxford (Corpus Christi College). He became a fellow of Queen s College, and brought out excellent editions of Juvenal, Thucydides, Demosthenes, etc. In 1883 he published, in two volumes, a History of Latin Literature. Simcox, who was influenced by Swinburne and Morris, contributed to the magazines a number of sympathetic studies of Shelley, Harriet Martineau, Eenan, and other Eationalists. His own thorough scepticism is best seen in his poems (Poems and Romances, 1869) and his drama Prometheus Unbound (1867). D. 1885.

SIMON, Francois Jules, French philo sopher and statesman. B. Dec. 27, 1814. Ed. College de L Orient, College de Vannes, and Ecole Normale. He adopted teaching, and was appointed professor of philosophy at Caen in 1836, and at Versailles in 1837. He helped Cousin in his translation of Plato (or did it for him), and was named auxiliary professor to him at the Sorbonne. He was a Eationalist of the moderate school of Cousin ; but he helped to found the Liberte de Penser, and opposed reaction. In 1848 he was returned to the Constituent Assembly, but he resigned, and entered the Council of State. Simon was not liked by the advanced Eationalists of a later date ; yet in 1851, when Louis Napoleon seized power, he made so bold a protest from his chair at the Sorbonne that he was stripped of all his offices. He strongly opposed the clergy under the Second Empire, and

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