Absolute
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Absolute. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
opposed to relative; means that the thing is considered in itself and without reference to other things. 1. Absolute or non-connotative, according to Whately, is opposed opp to attributive The former does not or connotative. take note of attribute connected an with the object, which the latter does. 2. According to J. S. Mill, it is incorrect to regard non-connotative and absolute as synonymous terms. He considers absolute to mean non-relative, and to be opposed to relative. In metaphysics, absolute means existing independently of any other cause. A case absolute, in grammar, is one consisting essentially of a substantive and a participle, which form a clause not agreeing with or governed by any word in the remainder of the sentence. In Greek, the absolute case is the genitive; in Latin, the ablative; in English, it is considered to be the nominative. In law, personal rights are divided into absolute and relative-absolute, which pertain to men as individuals; and relative, which are incident to them as members of society, standing in various relations to each other. The three chief rights of an absolute kind are the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property. Absolute, in natural philosophy, is generally opposed to relative. As this relativity may be of many kinds, various shades of meaning arise, thus: 1. Absolute or real expansion of a liquid, as opposed to its apparent expansion, the expansion which would arise when the liquid is heated, if the vessel containing it did not itself expand. (See Atkinson's "Ganot's Physics," bk. vi, ch. iii.) 2. Absolute gravity is the gravity of a body viewed apart from all modifying influences, as, for instance, of the atmosphere. To ascertain its amount, therefore, the body must be weighed in vacuo. 3. Absolute motion is the change of place on a body produced by the motion so designated viewed apart from the modifying influence arising from disturbing elements of another kind. 4. Absolute space is space considered apart from the material bodies in it. 5. Absolute time is time viewed apart from events or any other subjects of mental conception with which it may be associated. 6. Absolute force of a center: Strength of a center. Absolute zero, an imaginary temperature so low that there would be no heat left.
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
Of the Absolute, the Logos , the Word of God, Theosophists profess to know nothing further than that it exists. The universes with their solar systems are but the manifestations of this Being, which man is capable of perceiving, and all of them are instinct with him, but what man can perceive is not the loftier manifestations but the lower. Man himself is an emanation from-the Absolute with which he will ultimately be re-united.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's listed "absolute space" and "absolute time" in 1921 as ordinary terms of natural philosophy, but Einstein had already dismantled both — special relativity in 1905, general relativity in 1915 — and within a few years of this entry's printing the Newtonian frame it assumes was gone from physics. "Absolute zero, an imaginary temperature so low that there would be no heat left" is no longer imaginary in any loose sense: it is fixed at −273.15 °C, laboratories now cool atoms to within billionths of a degree of it, and since 2019 the kelvin has been defined by fixing the Boltzmann constant. The philosophical sense mattered greatly in 1921, when the Absolute of Bradley and Royce dominated British and American idealism; that school collapsed in the following decades and the capitalised Absolute survives mainly in histories of philosophy and in theosophical writing of the kind the Occultism volume records. The grammatical entry has aged best — the Greek genitive absolute and Latin ablative absolute are still taught in exactly those terms.
Written for this edition, 2026.