Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luis Vives

 Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish humanist, was born in Valencia and died in Bruges. Considerably younger than such scholars as Desiderius Erasmus, Guillaume Budé, and John Colet, Vives deserves an honorable place among them for his moral seriousness, sincerity of religious belief, promotion of education, and social concern, as manifested in projects for the promotion of peace and the relief of the poor.

In many of these respects Vives is approached only by his nearer contemporary, Thomas More; his character emerges very favorably from any comparison with the earlier group. His efforts to secure patronage from the nobility did not blind him to the plight of those more needy than he, nor did he engage in the acrimonious personal quarrels that marred the character of some humanists.

Vives was a fine scholar and an excellent writer. After initial schooling in Spain he went to Paris to attend the university. Here he found still active a school of terminist logicians and physicists whose influence extended, so Vives tells us, to all the higher faculties.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace, the English naturalist and coformulator with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection, was born at Usk, Monmouthshire. He was largely self-educated, having left school at fourteen to serve as a surveyor’s assistant with his brother. Like many of his contemporaries he acquired an early taste for the study of nature.

But he also read widely and was influenced by the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Lyell, as Darwin was. In 1844, while teaching school at Leicester, he met the naturalist H. W. Bates (1825–1892), who introduced him to scientific entomology. The two men later embarked on a collecting trip to the Amazon, where Wallace remained for four years examining the tropical flora and fauna.

In 1854, after a brief visit to England,Wallace set out by himself for the Malay Archipelago. He subsequently wrote an account of this trip, The Malay Archipelago (London, 1869),which is a fascinating narrative. When he returned in 1862, he had become a convinced evolutionist and was known in scientific circles for his formulation of the theory of natural selection.

Richard Wahle

Richard Wahle

Richard Wahle, the Austrian philosopher and psychologist, was born in Vienna. He was appointed Privatdozent in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1885. A decade later he was called to a professorship in philosophy at the University of Czernowitz, where he taught until 1917.

From 1919 to 1933 he again lectured at the University of Vienna. Possessed of originality and an unusually lively style, he published a number of books in the fields of psychology, general philosophy, and ethics.

Wahle is known especially for his relentlessly sharp critique of traditional philosophy, particularly of metaphysics, which he regarded as “one of the most dangerous breeding-places of empty phrases.” An absolute, true knowledge, of the sort to which metaphysics aspires, cannot exist.