Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/598

Rh 552 N R N O R strengthen the national life of a really kindred people, and, that work done, he had lost himself in the greater mass of that kindred people. In Sicily his work, far more brilliant, far more beneficent at the time, could not be so lasting. The Norman princes made Sicily a kingdom ; they ruled it for a season better than any other kingdom was ruled ; but they could not make it a Norman kingdom, nor could they themselves become national Sicilian kings. The king dom that they founded has now vanished from among the kingdoms of the earth, because it was only a kingdom and not a nation. In every other way the Norman has vanished from Sicily as though he had never been. His very works of building are hardly witnesses to his presence, because, without external evidence, we should never have taken them to be his. In Sicily, in short, he gave a few genera tions of unusual peace and prosperity to several nations living side by side, and then he, so to speak, went his way from a land in which he had a work to do, but in which he never was really at home. In England he made himself, though by rougher means, more truly at home among unac knowledged kinsmen. When in outward show he seemed to work the unmaking of a nation he was in truth giving no small help towards its second making. (E. A. F.) NORMANTON, a township in the West Riding of Yorkshire, is situated on the Calder river, and on several railway lines, 3 miles (by rail) north-east of Wakefield and 24 south-south-west of York. The church of All Saints, an ancient stone structure in the Norman and Perpen dicular styles, with a square tower rebuilt in 1717, contains a number of interesting monuments. The grammar school Avas founded about the end of the 16th century. Traces still remain of a moat surrounding the town and connected with a Roman encampment which at one time occupied its site. A mound in the neighbourhood called Haw Hill is supposed to be a barrow. There are numerous collieries in the neighbourhood. The population of the urban sani tary district (1227 acres) in 1871 was 3448, and in 1881 it was 8038. The parish of Normanton (2517 acres) in cludes three townships, Normanton, Snydale, and New- land. Altofts (1698 acres), where Sir Martin Frobisher resided, was made into a separate parish in 1879. NORRIS, JOHN (1657-1711), the disciple of Plato and Malebranche, was born in 1657 at Collingbourne-Kingston in Wiltshire, where his father was then incumbent. He was educated at Winchester School, and entered at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1676. In 1680 he took his degree and was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College. He first made himself known in the university, Anthony Wood tells us, by a translation of Robert Waryng s philosophi cal poem, Effigies Arnoris, entitled The Picture of Love Unveiled. This appeared in 1682, and was followed in 1683 by his first original work, An Idea of Happiness. With Plato, he places the highest happiness or fruition of the soul in the contemplative love of God &quot; that primitive and original Beauty, Perfection, and Harmony.&quot; Norris s poems, mostly composed about this time, are, in the main, expressions of his habitual mood of devout but somewhat abstract contemplation. They have little poetic richness, but their grave style is often not without impressiveness, and works itself out at intervals into a felicitous stanza or a memorable line. A few pieces (such, for instance, as The Parting} might claim even a higher praise. The poems appeared in 1684 as the first part of a volume of Poems and Discourses occasionally written. Three years later a new and enlarged edition was published with the title, A Collection of Miscellanies ; and in this form the volume was popular enough to go through nine editions. In the midst of these graver productions Norris found leisure to give vent to his hereditary Tory and High- Church feeling in a satire on the Whiffs and a Latin tractate aimed at the Calvinistic dissenters. All through his life his intense intellectual activity seemed to make it almost a necessity for him to mingle in whatever contro versy was going on. But philosophy and philosophical theology formed his central interest. Malebranche .s Recherche de la Verite, which had appeared in 1674, made an easy conquest of the Oxford fellow, to whom its doc trine appeared no more than the consistent and clarified modern expression of that Platonized Christianity which met him alike in St John, in Plotinus, and in Augustine, the father whom he &quot;loved to speak after.&quot; Perhaps it would be more correct to say that Norris reads his favourite authors in the light of the theory derived from Malebranche. It is at least doubtful whether he would have reached any definiteness of philosophic theory for himself without the aid of the French thinker. He makes no secret of his discipleship. Malebranche, he says, &quot; is indeed the great Galileo of the intellectual world. He has given us the point of view, and. whatever further detections are made, it must be through his telescope.&quot; Norris s readings in modern philosophy were not confined, however, to Male branche ; he had studied the works of Descartes himself, and most of what had been written for and against Cartesianism on the Continent. Of English thinkers, More and Cudworth, the so-called Cambridge Platonists, had influenced him most ; and in 1685 his study of their works had ripened into a correspondence with the former. After More s death Norris published the correspondence between them as an appendix to his Platonically conceived essay on The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688). Some time before this Norris had taken orders, and in 1689, on being presented to the living of Newton St Loe, in Somersetshire, he married, and resigned his fellowship. In the same year he published Reason and Religion, the first of his riper works. The Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life, which he wrote (also in 1689) &quot;by way of letter to an excellent lady, the Lady Masham,&quot; did not advance his interests in that quarter ; for the lady, whose eyes were only weak, was nettled at being set down in the preface as blind. In 1690 Norris published a volume of Discourses upon the Beatitudes, which proved decidedly popular, and induced the author to follow it up by three more volumes of Practical Discourses between 1690 and 1698. The year 1690 is memorable as the year of the publication of Locke s Essay, and the book came into Norris s hands just as his volume of Discourses was passing through the press. He at once appreciated its importance, but its whole temper was alien from the modes of thought in which he had been reared, and its main conclusions moved him to keen dissent. He hastened to &quot; review &quot; it in an appendix to his sermons. These Cursory Reflections constitute Norris the first critic of the Essay ; and they anticipate some of the arguments that have since been persistently urged against Locke from the transcendental side. Though holding to the &quot;grey-headed, venerable doctrine &quot; of innate ideas as little as Locke himself, Norris finds the criticism in the first book of the Essay entirely inconclusive, and points out its inconsistency with Locke s own doctrine of evident or intuitively perceived truths. He also suggests the possibility of subconscious ideation, on which Leibnitz laid so much stress in the same con nexion. He next complains that Locke neglects to tell us &quot; what kind of things these ideas are which are let in at the gate of the senses.&quot; In other words, while giving a metaphorical account of how we come by our ideas, Locke leaves unconsidered the intellectual nature of the ideas or of thought in itself. Unless we come to some conclu sion on this point, Norris argues, we have little chance of being right in our theory of how ideas &quot; come to be united to our mind.&quot; He also puts his finger upon the weakness