a fortified town of Portugal, province of Estremadura, stands on the Arnoia, where it enters the lagoon of Obidos, 47 miles N. by W. of Lisbon. It has some ancient remains; and is remarkable for a victory gained here by the British under Wellington over the French, 15th August 1808. Pop. 3000.

OBJECT and OBJECTIVE, SUBJECT and SUBJECITIVE, are two pairs of correlative terms, much used in philosophical speculation, and not always free from ambiguity. The foundation of this capital distinction in philosophical terminology is to be found in the ultimate analysis of knowledge itself, of which philosophy lays claim to be the science. For if knowledge is the result of a relation between that which knows (the subject) and that which is known (the object), it follows that the terms Subject and Subjective, Object and Objective, stand forth as opposing contraries, to mark off compendiously the grand, the fundamental distinction which lies at the root of all knowledge. The general discrimination indicated by those terms is at once articulate and precise; but in their special application they are liable to ambiguity and equivocation. The Subject, as now commonly employed by philosophers, denotes that which knows; and is limited exclusively to the Ego, or conscious mind, called by the Germans Das Ich, and by the French Le Moi. Subjective, is employed in like manner to express what pertains to the mind, the Ego or thinking principle. The terms Object and Objective, again, are employed generally in contrast and correlation to these, to denote that which is known, the Non-ego, with its modes and properties, called by the Germans Das Nicht-Ich, and by the French Le Non-Moi. But it is obvious that the terms Subjective and Objective, while generally distinguishing what belongs to mind from what belongs to matter, are not quite thorough and unambiguous in their discrimination. For the object known is not of necessity a mode of what is called matter, or of the Non-ego. If I am conscious of joy or sorrow, for example, or call before my imagination the representation of a distant object, it is obvious that what the mind contemplates is, in this case, wholly in and of itself—is as emphatically a mode of the Ego as extension is of the Non-ego. But if the phenomena of the thinking subject can thus become objectified, so to speak, and converted into the object known, there at once emerges a palpable equivocation in the use of the terms Object and Subject. This ambiguity may be effectually avoided, however, by coupling with those terms a qualifying attribute when it is necessary to do so. While, therefore, Subject and Subjective should be employed in their simplicity to denote what belongs to, or is dependent on, the knowing mind, whether of man in general or of some man in particular; and Object and Objective to express what does not so belong or depend; some nomenclature is requisite to mark off precisely an object of knowledge as a mode of mind on the one hand, or as something different from mind on the other. "Without, therefore," says Sir William Hamilton, "disturbing the preceding nomenclature, which is not only ratified but convenient, I would propose that, when we wish to be precise, or when any ambiguity is to be dreaded, we should employ, on the one hand, either the terms subject-object, or subjective object (and this we could again distinguish as absolute or as relative); on the other, either object-object or objective object." With respect to the alternative indicated above parenthetically of the absolute or relative element in subjective objects, he remarks in another place, "But the subject-object may be either a mode of mind of which we are conscious as absolute, and for itself alone,—as, for example, a pain or pleasure; or a mode of mind of which we are conscious as relative to, and representative of, something else,—as, for instance, the imagination of something past or present. Of these we might distinguish, when necessary, the one as the absolute or the real subject-object; the other as the relative or the ideal, or the representative subject-object. Finally, it may be required to mark whether the object-object and the subject-object be immediately known as present, or only as represented. In this case we must resort, on the former alternative to the epithet presentative or intuitive; on the latter to those of represented, mediate, remote, primary, principal," &c. See Hamilton's edition of Reid, note B; in which there will be found a historical and critical exposition of the use of these terms in the Greek and scholastic philosophy. (See also Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques.)

It may not be improper to observe, that the words Subject and Object, besides possessing the technical signification just described, are also used in a popular sense entirely different. Thus, in the expression "subject of discourse," the word "subject" is employed for the materia circa quam, where object would be exclusively applied in philosophy. Object is also vulgarly used, both in France and England, for end, motive, final cause, &c.