SPIRITUALISM • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Spiritualism

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/spˈɪrɪtʃəwəlɪzm/ /spˈɪrɪtʃwəlˌɪzm/ Listen

noun

Spiritualism n.

The quality or state of being spiritual.

(Physiol.) The doctrine, in opposition to the materialists, that all which exists is spirit, or soul that what is called the external world is either a succession of notions impressed on the mind by the Deity, as maintained by Berkeley, or else the mere educt of the mind itself, as taught by Fichte.

A belief that departed spirits hold intercourse with mortals by means of physical phenomena, as by rappng, or during abnormal mental states, as in trances, or the like, commonly manifested through a person of special susceptibility, called a medium; spiritism; the doctrines and practices of spiritualists. "What is called spiritualism should, I think, be called a mental species of materialism."

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Etymology of 'Spiritualism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Spiritualism" Quotes from Famous Books

... been more than half-convinced of the truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing, it takes but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a belief in telepathy in this wise: "We produce electricity at every moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among magnetic currents. Yet for thousands ...

— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... difference between this belief of the dog or horse and the belief of primitive man? I maintain that an intuitive animistic tendency (which Mr. Spencer repudiates), and not dreams, lies at the root of all spiritualism. Would Mr. Spencer have had us believe that the dog's fear of the rolling parasol was a logical deduction from its canine dreams? This would scarcely elucidate the problem. The dog and the horse share ...

— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... What the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some great coming literatus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully poet, will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose the great poem of death. Then will man indeed confront Nature, and confront time and space, both with science, and con amore, and take his right place, prepared for life, master of fortune and misfortune. And then ...

— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... Papacy so jealously claimed as its own. Such a longing seized as much on tender and poetic tempers like George Herbert's as on positive and prosaic tempers, such as that of Laud. The one started back from the bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages had grouped around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, in the awful mystery ...

— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... region in which the way lies readily open to all kinds of superstition and self-deceit. The pursuit of truth for its own sake is essentially a religious thing: but the motives of many amateur dabblers in psychical research are far from being truly religious or spiritual. Much popular spiritualism, whether it assumes the form of table-turnings, of spirit-rappings, or of mediumistic seances, is thoroughly morbid and undesirable, and the Christian ...

— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

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