NATIONAL CONVENTION, the revolutionary assembly of France, consisting of 749 members chosen by universal suffrage, which on 22nd September 1792 supplanted the Legislative Assembly, proclaimed the Republic, and condemned Louis XVI. to the guillotine; in spite of its perplexities and internal discords, it was successful in suppressing the Royalists in La Vendee and the south, and repelling the rest of Europe leagued against it, not only in arms, but in the field of diplomacy; it laid the foundation of several of the academic institutions of the country, which have since contributed to its glory as well as welfare, and collected them together in the world-famous Institute; its work done, “weary of its own existence, and all men sensibly weary of it,” it willingly deceased in an act of self-dissolution in favour of a Directory of Five on 20th October 1795.

NATIONAL COVENANT.  See COVENANT.

NATIONAL GUARD, THE, a militia of citizens organised in the municipality of Paris in 1790, with Lafayette as commandant, but suppressed in 1827, and again suppressed in 1872, after two revivals, in consequence of their taking part with the Commune of the latter date.

NATURAL SELECTION, name given by Darwin to the survival of certain plants and animals that are fitted, and the decease contemporaneously of certain others that are not fitted, to a new environment.

NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM, Carlyle’s name in “Sartor” for the supernatural found latent in the natural, and manifesting itself in it, or of the miraculous in the common and everyday course of things; name of a chapter which, says Dr. Stirling, “contains the very first word of a higher philosophy as yet spoken in Great Britain, the very first English word towards the restoration and rehabilitation of the dethroned Upper Powers”; recognition at bottom, as the Hegelian philosophy teaches, and the life of Christ certifies, of the finiting of the infinite in the transitory forms of space and time.

NATURALISM, a philosophical term used to denote the resolution of the supernatural into the natural, and its obliteration; the reference of everything to merely natural laws, and the denial of all supernatural interference with them.

NATURE WORSHIP, the worship of the forces of nature conceived of as personal deities.

NAUSICAA, the daughter of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, who gave welcome to Ulysses when shipwrecked on the shore, and whom Homer represents as, along with her maidens, washing the clothes of the hero and his companions.

NAUVOO, a village in Illinois, on the Mississippi, where the Mormons first settled in 1840, and from which they were expelled in 1846.

NAVARINO, a bay on the SW. coast of the Morea, the scene of the naval victory of the Athenians over the Spartans 425 B.C., and of the annihilation of the Turkish and Egyptian navies by the combined fleets of England, France, and Russia, under Codrington, 20th October 1827.