[Real], an old Spanish silver coin still in use in Spain, Mexico, and some other of the old Spanish colonies, also is a money of account in Portugal; equals one-fourth of the peseta, and varies in value from 2½ d. to 5d. with the rise and fall of exchange.
[Real], a legal term in English law applied to property of a permanent or immovable kind, e. g. land, to distinguish it from personal or movable property.
[Real Presence], the assumed presence, really and substantially, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist of the body and blood, the soul and divinity, of Christ, a doctrine of the Romish and certain other Churches.
[Realism], as opposed to Nominalism, is the belief that general terms denote real things and are not mere names or answerable to the mere conception of them, and as opposed to idealism, is in philosophy the belief that we have an immediate cognition of things external to us, and that they are as they seem. In art and literature it is the tendency to conceive and represent things as they are, however unsightly and immoral they may be, without any respect to the beautiful, the true, or the good. In Ruskin's teaching mere realism is not art; according to him art is concerned with the rendering and portrayal of ideals.
[Realm, Estates of the], the Sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons in Great Britain.
[Real-schule], a German school in which languages, sciences, and arts are taught to qualify for apprenticeship in some special business or craft.
[Reason], in philosophy is more than mere understanding or reasoning power; it is the constitutive and regulative soul of the universe assumed to live and breathe in the inner life or soul of man, as that develops itself in the creations of human genius working in accord with and revealing the deep purpose of the Maker.
[Reason], in German Vernunft, defined by Dr. Stirling "the faculty that unites and brings together, as against the understanding," in German Verstand, "the faculty that separates, and only in separation knows," and that is synthetic of the whole, whereof the latter is merely analytic of the parts, sundered from the whole, and without idea of the whole, the former being the faculty which construes the diversity of the universe into a unity or the one, whereas the latter dissolves the unity into diversity or the many.
[Reason, Goddess of], a Mrs. Momoro, wife of a bookseller in Paris, who, on the 10th November 1793, in the church of Notre Dame, represented what was called Reason, but was only scientific analysis, which the revolutionaries of France proposed, through her representing such, to install as an object of worship to the dethronement of the Church, l'infâme.
[Réaumur], French scientist, born in La Rochelle; made valuable researches and discoveries in the industrial arts as well as in natural history; is best known as the inventor of the thermometer that bears his name, which is graduated into 80 degrees from the temperature of melting ice to that of boiling water (1683-1757).