1245, contributed to the institution of the Feast of Holy Sacrament, the reform of the Carmelites (1247), and the condemnations of the Introductorius in evangelium aeternum of Gherardino del Borgo San Donnino (1255), and of William of St Amour’s De periculis novissimorum temporum. He died at Orvieto on the 19th of March 1263. He directed the first revision of the text of the Vulgate, begun in 1236 by the Dominicans; this first “correctorium,” vigorously criticized by Roger Bacon, was revised in 1248 and in 1256, and forms the base of the celebrated Correctorium Bibliae Sorbonicum. With the aid of many of his order he edited the first concordance of the Bible (Concordantiae Sacrorum Bibliorum or Concordantiae S. Jacobi), but the assertion that we owe the present division of the chapters of the Vulgate to him is false.
Besides a commentary on the book of Sentences, he wrote the Postillae in sacram scripturam juxta quadruplicem sensum, litteralem, allegoricum, anagogicum et moralem, published frequently in the 15th and 16th centuries. His Sermones de tempore et sanctis are apparently only extracts. His exegetical works were published at Venice in 1754 in 8 vols.
See, for sources, Quetif-Echard, Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum; Denifle, in Archiv für Litteratur und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, i. 49, ii. 171, iv. 263 and 471; L’Année dominicaine, iii. (1886) 509 and 883; Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, i. 158. (H. L.)
HUGH OF ST VICTOR (c. 1078–1141), mystic philosopher, was probably born at Hartingam, in Saxony. After spending some time in a house of canons regular at Hamersleben, in Saxony, where he completed his studies, he removed to the abbey of St Victor at Marseilles, and thence to the abbey of St Victor in Paris. Of this last house he rose to be canon, in 1125 scholasticus, and perhaps even prior, and it was there that he died on the 11th of February 1141. His eloquence and his writings earned for him a renown and influence which far exceeded St Bernard’s, and which held its ground until the advent of the Thomist philosophy. Hugh was more especially the initiator of a movement of ideas—the mysticism of the school of St Victor—which filled the whole of the second part of the 12th century. “The mysticism which he inaugurated,” says Ch. V. Langlois, “is learned, unctuous, ornate, florid, a mysticism which never indulges in dangerous temerities; it is the orthodox mysticism of a subtle and prudent rhetorician.” This tendency undoubtedly shows a marked reaction from the contentious theology of Roscellinus and Abelard. For Hugh of St Victor dialectic was both insufficient and perilous. Yet he did not profess the haughty contempt for science and philosophy which his followers the Victorines expressed; he regarded knowledge, not as an end in itself, but as the vestibule of the mystic life. The reason, he thought, was but an aid to the understanding of the truths which faith reveals. The ascent towards God and the functions of the “threefold eye of the soul”—cogitatio, meditatio and contemplatio—were minutely taught by him in language which is at once precise and symbolical.
Manuscript copies of his works abound, and are to be found in almost every library which possesses a collection of ancient writings. The works themselves are very numerous and very diverse. The middle ages attributed to him sixty works, and the edition in Migne’s Patr. Lat. vols. clxxv.-clxxvii. (Paris, 1854) contains no fewer than forty-seven treatises, commentaries and collections of sermons. Of that number, however, B. Hauréau (Les Œuvres de Hugues de St Victor (1st ed., Paris, 1859; 2nd ed., Paris, 1886) contests the authenticity of several, which he ascribes with some show of probability to Hugh of Fouilloi, Robert Paululus or others. Among those works with which Hugh of St Victor may almost certainly be credited may be mentioned the celebrated De sacramentis christianae fidei; the Didascalicon de studio legendi; the treatises on mysticism entitled Soliloquium de arrha animae, De contemplatione et ejus operibus, Aureum de meditando opusculum, De arca Noë morali, De arca Noë mystica, De vanitate mundi, De arrha animae, De amore sponsi ad sponsam, &c.; the introduction (Praenotatiunculae) to the study of the Scriptures; homilies on the book of Ecclesiastes; commentaries on other books of the Bible, e.g. the Pentateuch, Judges, Kings, Jeremiah, &c.
See B. Hauréau, op. cit. and Notices et extraits des MSS. latins de la Bibliothèque Nationale, passim; De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale (Louvain, 1900), pp. 220–221; article by H. Denifle in Archiv für Literatur und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, iii. 634-640 (1887); A. Mignon, Les Origines de la scholastique et Hugues de St Victor (Paris, 1895); J. Kilgenstein, Die Gotteslehre des Hugo von St Victor (1898). (P. A.)
HUGHES, DAVID EDWARD (1831–1900), Anglo-American electrician, was born on the 16th of May 1831 in London, but the earlier part of his life was spent in America, whither his parents emigrated when he was about seven years old. In 1850 he became professor of music at the college of Bardstown, Kentucky, and soon afterwards his attainments in physical science procured his appointment as teacher of natural philosophy at the same place. His professorial career, however, was brief, for in 1854 he removed to Louisville to supervise the manufacture of the type-printing telegraph instrument which he had been thinking out for some time, and which was destined to make both his name and his fortune. The patent for this machine was taken out in the United States in 1855, and its success was immediate. After seeing it well established on one side of the Atlantic, Hughes in 1857 brought it over to his native country, where, however, the telegraph companies did not receive it with any favour. Two or three years afterwards he introduced it to the notice of the French Government, who, after submitting it to severe tests, ultimately adopted it, and in the succeeding ten years it came into extensive use all over Europe, gaining for its inventor numerous honours and prizes. In the development of telephony also Hughes had an important share, and the telephone has attained its present perfection largely as a result of his investigations. The carbon transmitters which in various forms are in almost universal use are modifications of a simple device which he called a microphone, and which consists essentially of two pieces of carbon, in loose contact one with the other. The arrangement constitutes a variable electrical resistance of the most delicate character; if it is included in an electric circuit with a battery and subjected to the influence of sonorous vibrations, its resistance varies in such a way as to produce an undulatory current which affords an exact representation of the sound waves as to height, length and form. These results were published in 1878, but Hughes did much more work on the properties of such microphonic joints, of which he said nothing till many years afterwards. When towards the end of 1879 he found that they were also sensitive to “sudden electric impulses, whether given out to the atmosphere through the extra current from a coil or from a frictional machine,” he in fact discovered the phenomena on which depends the action of the so-called “coherers” used in wireless telegraphy. But he went further and practised wireless telegraphy himself, surmising, moreover, that the agency he was employing consisted of true electric waves. Setting some source of the “sudden electric impulses” referred to above into operation in his house, he walked along the street carrying a telephone in circuit with a small battery and one of these microphonic joints, and found that the sounds remained audible in the telephone until he had traversed a distance of 500 yards. This experiment he showed to several English men of science, among others to Sir G. G. Stokes, to whom he broached the theory that the results were due to electric waves. That physicist, however, was not disposed to accept this explanation, considering that a sufficient one could be found in well-known electromagnetic induction effects, and Hughes was so discouraged at that high authority taking this view of the matter that he resolved to publish no account of his inquiry until further experiments had enabled him to prove the correctness of his own theory. These experiments were still in progress when H. R. Hertz settled the question by his researches on electric waves in 1887–1889. Hughes, who is also known for his invention of the induction balance and for his contributions to the theory of magnetism, died in London on the 22nd of January 1900. As an investigator he was remarkable for the simplicity of the apparatus which served his purposes, domestic articles like jam-pots, pins, &c., forming a large part of the equipment of his laboratory. His manner of life, too, was simple and frugal in the extreme. He amassed a large fortune, which, with the exception of some bequests to the Royal Society, the Paris Academy of Sciences, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the Paris Société Internationale des Électriciens, for the establishment of scholarships and prizes in physical science, was left to four London hospitals, subject only to certain life annuities.
