Phillip;

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Philology

Phillips Exeter Academy, a bcnV pre-
paratory school in Exeter, N. H., incor-
porated in 1781 and named for Dr. John
Phillips. It is well equipped with academy
buildings, laboratories, library, gymnasium,
fine dormitories, and athletic fields, and num-
bers among its graduates Daniel Webster and
George Bancroft.

Phillpotts, Eden (1862- ), English
novelist, was born in Mount Aboo, India,
his father, Capt, Henry Phillpotts, being an
officer in the British army. His portrayals
of life in Devonshire arc especially notable.
Among his long list of works, chiefly novels,
are Children of the Mist (1898); Sons of the
Morning (1900); The River (1902); The
Secret Woman (1905); The Whirlwind
(1907); Widccombe Fair (1913); The
Bronze Venus (1921) ; Bred in the Bone
(1932); A Clip of Happiness (play 1933);
Awake Deborah (1941).

Philoctetes, a famous archer, the friend
and armor bearer of Hercules, who be-
queathed him his bow and poisoned ar-
rows. As one of the suitors of Helen, he led
seven ships against Troy; but being bitten
in the foot by a snake, he fell ill. The Greeks
left him on the island of Lcmnos, where for
ten years he spent a miserable life. But an
oracle declared that Troy could not be taken
without the arrows of Hercules, so Ulysses
and Neoptolcmus were dispatched to bring
Philoctetes to the Greek camp; where, healed
by Aesculapius or his sons, the restored hero
slew Paris, and helped powerfully in taking
Troy. After the war he settled in Italy. A
play of Sophocles is named for him,

Philodendron, a genus of tropical Ameri-
can shrubs and trees and occasionally herba-
ceous plants, belonging to the order Araceae.
Some of them climb.

Philo Judaeus—f.e. the Jew—(b. c. 20
B.C.)> Hellenistic philosopher and theologian,
of Alexandria. The distinguishing feature in
Philo is what he finds in his allegories—vis.
the doctrines of the syncretistic philosophy
of the age, He identified the God of Israel
with the divine Being of Plato—transcend-
ent, unconditioned by time, space, cv qua1-
ity, nameless even, except under the Tetra-
grammaton jnvH, Jehovah, the Existent;
but also with the deity of the Stoics, imma-
nent in the reason and goodness of the world.
This God did not create the world directly,
for that would have been to degrade his pure
essence, but acted through the intermediary
of 'powers' (dummeis), the chief of which
is the Logos which, though Philo personi-

fies, he may not have regarded as personal.
Philological Association, American, a

society established in 1869 as the outgrowth
of the American Oriental Society for the
diffusion of philological knowledge.

Philology, or the science of language, in-
cludes the description and explanation of the
phenomena of language. The divisions of
philology are necessarily determined by the
nature of its subject matter, language. Lan-
guage, whether understood as human speech
or not, has both a physical and a psychologi-
cal aspect. Mewed psychologically, lan-
guage is an intelligible expression of feelings,
thoughts, wishes, etc. It is more than a means
of communicating thought. Physically, on
the other hand, it is a part of the phenomena
of sound; it consists of sound combinations
produced by the vocal organs (of man).
Within the wide range of human speech there
are hundreds of systems, each complete in it-
self, and each called a language. A commu-
nity which speaks one language may divide
into several communities owing to political
or geographical or economic causes. When
such a division takes place, each of the newly-
formed communities acquires a distinctive lan-
guage of its own. The new languages are
modified forms of the old, and therefore
related to one another and to the 'parent'
language.

In philology, as in political history or in
the history of any art, the historical develop-
ment of special periods and nations must
be studied separately. At the same time,
there is room and need for a general treat-
ment of the nature of language and the
principles of its development. The starting-
point of linguistic study would be the mod-
ern languages with which we are most fa-
miliar. Here our knowledge is direct, and the
record is fullest. This is particularly the case
in the department of phonetics. We are never
independent of the imperfect and misleading
representations of writing except when we
hear the speech of a people with our own
cars. Man's capacity for producing sounds
by the use of his vocal organs is the primary
physical condition which has made the acqui-
sition and development of language possible.
The primitive nature of this capacity is evi-
dent from the extent to which it is possessed
by the animal world in general, The expres-
sion of feeling by the involuntary utterance
of sounds may be regarded as the initial stage
in the development of language. The num-
ber of sounds used in any one language
is comparatively limited, and although there