See [Scholasticism]; also V. Cousin, Œuvres inédites of Abelard (Paris, 1836); Hauréau, Philosophie scolastique, i. 396 foll.
BERNARD, CHARLES DE, whose full name was Pierre Marie Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette (1804-1850), French writer, was born at Besançon on the 25th of February 1804. After studying for the law, and then taking to journalism, he was encouraged by Balzac (whose Peau de chagrin he had reviewed) to settle in Paris and devote himself to authorship; and the result was a series of volumes of fiction, remarkable for their picture of provincial society and the Parisian bourgeoisie. The best of these are Le Nœud gordien (1838), containing among other short stories Une Aventure de magistrat, from which Sardou drew his comedy of the Pommes du voisin; Gerfaut (1838), considered his masterpiece; Les Ailes d’Icare (1840), La Peau du lion (1841) and Le Gentilhomme campagnard (1847).
His Œuvres complètes (12 vols.), which appeared after his death on the 6th of March 1850, include also his poetry and two comedies written in collaboration with “Léonce” (C.H.L. Laurençot, 1805-1862). A flattering appreciation by Armand de Pontmartin is prefixed to Un Beau-père in this collection. In W.M. Thackeray’s Paris Sketch-book (“On some fashionable French novels”) there is an admirable criticism of Bernard. See also an essay by Henry James in French Poets and Novelists (1884).
BERNARD, CLAUDE (1813-1878), French physiologist, was born on the 12th of July 1813 in the village of Saint-Julien near Villefranche. He received his early education in the Jesuit school of that town, and then proceeded to the college at Lyons, which, however, he soon left to become assistant in a druggist’s shop. His leisure hours were devoted to the composition of a vaudeville comedy, La Rose du Rhône, and the success it achieved moved him to attempt a prose drama in five acts, Arthur de Bretagne. At the age of twenty-one he went to Paris, armed with this play and an introduction to Saint-Marc Girardin, but the critic dissuaded him from adopting literature as a profession, and urged him rather to take up the study of medicine. This advice he followed, and in due course became interne at the Hôtel Dieu. In this way he was brought into contact with the great physiologist, F. Magendie, who was physician to the hospital, and whose official préparateur at the Collège de France he became in 1841. Six years afterwards he was appointed his deputy-professor at the collège, and in 1855 he succeeded him as full professor. Some time previously he had been chosen the first occupant of the newly-instituted chair of physiology at the Sorbonne. There no laboratory was provided for his use, but Louis Napoleon, after an interview with him in 1864, supplied the deficiency, at the same time building a laboratory at the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes, and establishing a professorship, which Bernard left the Sorbonne to accept in 1868—the year in which he was admitted a member of the Institute. He died in Paris on the 10th of February 1878 and was accorded a public funeral—an honour which had never before been bestowed by France on a man of science.
Claude Bernard’s first important work was on the functions of the pancreas gland, the juice of which he proved to be of great significance in the process of digestion; this achievement won him the prize for experimental physiology from the Academy of Sciences. A second investigation—perhaps his most famous—was on the glycogenic function of the liver; in the course of this he was led to the conclusion, which throws light on the causation of diabetes, that the liver, in addition to secreting bile, is the seat of an “internal secretion,” by which it prepares sugar at the expense of the elements of the blood passing through it. A third research resulted in the discovery of the vaso-motor system. While engaged, about 1851, in examining the effects produced in the temperature of various parts of the body by section of the nerve or nerves belonging to them, he noticed that division of the cervical sympathetic gave rise to more active circulation and more forcible pulsation of the arteries in certain parts of the head, and a few months afterwards he observed that electrical excitation of the upper portion of the divided nerve had the contrary effect. In this way he established the existence of vaso-motor nerves—both vaso-dilatator and vaso-constrictor. The study of the physiological action of poisons was also a favourite one with him, his attention being devoted in particular to curare and carbon monoxide gas. The earliest announcements of his results, the most striking of which were obtained in the ten years from about 1850 to 1860, were generally made in the recognized scientific publications; but the full exposition of his views, and even the statement of some of the original facts, can only be found in his published lectures. The various series of these Leçons fill seventeen octavo volumes. He also published Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865), and Physiologie générale (1872).
An English Life of Bernard, by Sir Michael Foster, was published in London in 1899.
BERNARD, JACQUES (1658-1718), French theologian and publicist, was born at Nions in Dauphiné on the 1st of September 1658. Having studied at Geneva, he returned to France in 1679, and was chosen minister of Venterol in Dauphiné, whence he afterwards removed to the church of Vinsobres. As he continued to preach the reformed doctrines in opposition to the royal ordinance, he was obliged to leave the country and retired to Holland, where he was well received and appointed one of the pensionary ministers of Gouda. In July 1686 he commenced his Histoire abrégée de l’Europe, which he continued monthly till December 1688. In 1692 he began his Lettres historiques, containing an account of the most important transactions in Europe; he carried on this work till the end of 1698, after which it was continued by others. When Le Clerc discontinued his Bibliothèque universelle in 1691. Bernard wrote the greater part of the twentieth volume and the five following volumes. In 1698 he collected and published Actes et négotiations de la paix de Ryswic, in four volumes 12mo. In 1699 he began a continuation of Bayle’s Nouvelles de la république des lettres, which continued till December 1710. In 1705 he was unanimously elected one of the ministers of the Walloon church at Leiden; and about the same time he succeeded M. de Valder in the chair of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden. In 1716 he published a supplement to Moreri’s dictionary, in two volumes folio. The same year he resumed his Nouvelles de la république des lettres, and continued it till his death, on the 27th of April 1718. Besides the works above mentioned, he was the author of two practical treatises, one on late repentance (1712), the other on the excellence of religion (1714).