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 ECKHART in Constantinople, Nov. 12, 1832. He served his apprenticeship in Quebec, and in 1796 re- moved to New York, where he introduced many important changes in the art of ship building. During the war of 1812 he built a fleet of vessels of war for the United States on the lakes with great rapidity, cutting the tim- ber from the forests and transporting the equip- ments from the seaboard. After the war he constructed the Robert Fulton, which made in 1822 the first successful voyage by steam to New Orleans and Havana. He was for a time naval constructor at the navy yard in Brook- lyn, and he also built war vessels for various European and South American powers. In 1831 he built a sloop of war for Sultan Mah- moud, and was invited to enter his services as naval constructor. He took up his residence in Constantinople, organized a navy yard there, and laid the keel of a ship of the line, but did not live to see it completed. ECKHiRT, Meister (master), the father of German mysticism, born probably in Stras- burg in the middle of the 18th century, died probably in Cologne about 1328. He studied theology and philosophy in Paris, became a Dominican friar in Rome, and*afterward pro- vincial of the order in Germany, vicar general for Bohemia, and prior in Frankfort-on-the- Main. His attempts to reform the Dominican convents and his exalted mysticism caused him to be suspected of heresy, and in 1327, while he was in Cologne, Archbishop Henry sub- stantiated the charge before a tribunal of the inquisition. A papal bull was issued against his writings, March 27, 1329, which declared that he had recanted before his death. This alleged recantation merely consisted, according to a document of Feb. 13, 1327, still extant, in his protest against the malicious interpretation of garbled passages from his doctrines, which in his opinion had never transcended the bounds I of orthodoxy. Tauler, Suso, and other eminent men were among his disciples, who cherished his memory as a profound thinker, a lucid ex- pounder of the most abstruse speculation, and one of the best German prose writers. The second volume of Pfeiffer's Die Deutschen Mystiker des 14. JaJirhunderts (Leipsic, 1857) contains his preserved sermons and treatises. See also Bach's Meister Eckhart, der Vater der deutschen Speculation (Vienna, 1864). ECKMiJHL, or Eggmiihl, a village of Bavaria, on the river Grosse Laber, 13 m. S. S. E. of Ratis- bon, memorable for the great victory gained there by Napoleon over the Austrians under the archduke Charles, April 22, 1809. Mar- shal Davoust, having especially signalized his valor during the engagement, was created prince of Eckmuhl. This battle, and the minor actions of Abensberg (April 20), Landshut (21), and Ratisbon (23), which closely preceded or followed it, cost Austria 25,000 men, and obliged the archduke Charles to retire into Bohemia, and to leave open to Napoleon the highway to Vienna. ECLIPSE 391 ^ ECKSTEIN, Ferdinand, baron d', a French pub- licist, born of Jewish parents in Denmark in 1790, died in November, 1861. He became a convert to Catholicism, took part in the cam- paigns of 1812-'14, held various offices under the Bourbons in France, who conferred on him the title of baron, and retired from public life in 1830. From 1826 to 1829 he conducted a peri- odical, Le Catholique, in which he advocated the religious views of De Maistre and De Bo- nald. Among other works he published De VEspagne, Des Jesuites, De V Europe, and Des sources de Vopinion publique en Europe. He was an orientalist, and at his death was engaged on a Histoire des origines de Vhumanite. ECLECTICS (Gr. eKMyeiv, to select), a class of ancient philosophers who professed to select whatever was good and true from all the other philosophical sects, that they might combine it in a new system. They held Plato in the high- est esteem, but did not hesitate to add to his doctrines whatever they thought conformable to reason in the tenets of the other schools, or to reject whatever they disapproved. The eclectic system is supposed to have originated with Potamon of Alexandria, a Platonist; it flourished at Alexandria about the beginning of our era ; and it reached its perfection under Arnmonius Saccas, who blended Christianity with his views, and founded the Neo-Platonic sect of the Ammonians toward the end of the 2d century. The moral doctrine of the Eclectics was, that the mind of man, originally part of the Divine Being, having fallen into darkness and defilement through its connection with the body, is to be gradually emancipated from the influence of matter, and rise by con- templation to the knowledge and likeness of God ; and that this result, which is the great end of philosophy, is to be attained through abstinence, voluntary mortification, and reli- gious exercises. In the infancy of this school, not a few professors of Christianity were led to think that a coalition might advantageously be formed between its system and that of the gospel. The only consequence was the cor- ruption of the doctrines of the New Testament, by their mixture with pagan ideas and opinions. One of the most eminent Eclectics was Pro- clus, an edition of whose works was prepared by Victor Cousin (6 vols., Paris, 1820-'27), who used the term Eclecticism in a different sense to represent his own philosophical system. ECLIPSE (Gr. e/de/Tmv, to fade away, vanish), the obscuration of one celestial body by another, whether by intercepting the light coming from it or the light illuminating it. Eclipses of the former kind are sometimes called eclipses, sometimes occultations, and sometimes tran- sits. Thus when the moon hides the sun's face wholly or in part, the phenomenon is call- ed an eclipse of the sun or a solar eclipse ; but when the moon conceals a star, the phenome- non is called an occupation of the star. Again, when Jupiter or Saturn hides one of his satel- lites by intervening between the earth and that