spiritualism

spiritualism is defined in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913) with 2 senses, and appears in Roget's Thesaurus (1911) with 33 related terms. The full text of each entry is reproduced verbatim below.

Definitions

  1. 1.(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.
  2. 2.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. R. H. Hutton.

Source: Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition (public domain, via GCIDE / Project Gutenberg).

Synonyms

Related questions

Sources