Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Naturalism   Listen
noun
Naturalism  n.  
1.
A state of nature; conformity to nature.
2.
(Metaph.) The doctrine of those who deny a supernatural agency in the miracles and revelations recorded in the Bible, and in spiritual influences; also, any system of philosophy which refers the phenomena of nature to a blind force or forces acting necessarily or according to fixed laws, excluding origination or direction by one intelligent will.
3.
The theory that art or literature should conform to nature; realism; also, the quality, rendering, or expression of art or literature executed according to this theory.
4.
Specifically: The principles and characteristics professed or represented by a 19th-century school of realistic writers, notably by Zola and Maupassant, who aimed to give a literal transcription of reality, and laid special stress on the analytic study of character, and on the scientific and experimental nature of their observation of life.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Naturalism" Quotes from Famous Books



... third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any semblance ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... where he says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... them together. It was a fit time for political economy to supplant ethics. There was nowhere an ideal which could lift man above his natural self, and teach him, by losing it, to find a higher life. And, as a necessary consequence, religion gave way to naturalism ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... individual, almost of a caricature, which we find sometimes in archaic art, and which is certainly to be seen occasionally in works of Florentine sculpture. During the period of the rise of Greek sculpture the various schools were advancing each in its own way towards what has been called naturalism in art, as opposed to realism on the one side and idealism on the other. That is to say, they were striving by constant study of the athletic form, of proportions and muscles, of drapery and hair, to attain to a series ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... Fiske, Rolph, Barratt, Stephen, Carneri, Hoffding, Gizycki, Alexander, Ree. As works which criticise evolutionistic ethics from an intuitive point of view and in an instructive way, may be cited: Guyau "La morale anglaise contemporaine" (Paris, 1879.), and Sorley, "Ethics of Naturalism". I will only mention some interesting contributions to ethical discussion which can be found in Darwinism besides the idea ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... either as a study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic movement of the eighties was launched by men whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is in that field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. "German naturalism," says George Madison Priest, quoting Gotthold Klee's "Grunzuege der deutschen Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in the drama."[18] True enough, it has also produced occasional novels, and some of them are respectable. Gustav Frenssen's "Joern Uhl" is a ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers

... realism; and he has some words of just censure for the French naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes even mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide difference that passes between this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goes somewhat further than I should go in condemning it. "The French naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life." . . . It is characterized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype of this literature is the 'Madame ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... not be advised,' a gentleman beside her said after a delicate pause to let her impulsive naturalism ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human Body.' And the Body of one Dead;—a temple where the Hero-soul once was and now is not: Oh, all mystery, all pity, all mute awe and wonder; Super-naturalism brought home to the very dullest; Eternity laid open, and the nether Darkness and the upper Light-Kingdoms, do conjoin there, or exist nowhere! Sauerteig used to say to me, in his peculiar way: "A Chancery Lawsuit; justice, nay justice in mere money, denied a man, for all his pleading, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... my part, I don't think that it was any mere chance of position that set a rose-window of Saint Eustache right in the middle of the central markets. No; there's a whole manifesto in it. It is modern art, realism, naturalism—whatever you like to call it—that has grown up and dominates ancient art. Don't ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... "Realism, naturalism," he mused, recalling a course in philosophy, "one would expect the Russian, in the conditions under which he lives, possessing an artistic temperament combined with a paralysis of the initiative and a sense of fate, to write in that way. And the Frenchmen, Renan, Zola, and the others who have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... have reached the extreme of self-concentration and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of its pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible. There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in memory, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... face of every effort to conciliate the naturalism in man, men look upon these churches, and the Christianity they advocate, with suspicion. They see these churches have their goods still marked with the words, "supernatural," "miraculous." It is true, these churches may practically put such goods out of sight; even then, men will not be attracted ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... yet, while Christians sleep, become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, antagonism in the land to all evangelical instruction and piety. But how long before they will be so,—when they shall have become the mere creatures of the State, and, under the plea of no sectarianism, mere naturalism shall be the substance of all the religious, and the basis of all the secular teaching which they shall give? And let it not be forgotten that strong currents of influence, in all parts of the country, acting in no chance ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... ensure her fame. She denied ever having written for posterity, and she predicted that in fifty years she would be forgotten. It may be that there has been for her, as there is for every illustrious author who dies, a time of test and a period of neglect. The triumph of naturalism, by influencing taste for a time, may have stopped our reading George Sand. At present we are just as tired of documentary literature as we are disgusted with brutal literature. We are gradually coming ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... sozomenon e, all' autos ekeinos anakephalaiothe teroumenes tes homoiotetos]; III. 23. 1: IV. 38: V. 36: IV. 20: V. 16, 19-21, 22. In working out this thought Irenaeus verges here and there on soteriological naturalism (see especially the disquisitions regarding the salvation of Adam, opposed to Tatian's views, in III. 23). But he does not fall into this for two reasons. In the first place, as regards the history, of Jesus, he has been taught by Paul not to stop ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... which a mortal may form of a god; but there was nothing mean or vulgar in the works of the former; on the contrary, it was with a pure and noble spirit that he endeavored to represent the perfections of youthful, manly beauty, and his naturalism was of a healthy and ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... with its early philosophy of naturalism and humanism and its later political expression in liberty, equality, and fraternity, razed the physical and spiritual walls of the ghetto and set up the "Jewish problem." Following the Revolution, four currents of thought and action, working both simultaneously and successively, causing, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... among the Semites of Palestine; Zoroasterism grew and became the creed of a conquering race, the Iranic Aryans; Buddhism rose and spread with marvellous rapidity among the Aryans of Hindostan; while scientific naturalism took its rise among the Aryans of Ionia. It would be difficult to find another three centuries which have given birth to four events of equal importance. All the principal existing religions of mankind have grown ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly about him; it was only an excess ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... four-sided pyramid, and afterwards brought more or less into a true image of leaves, but deriving all its beauty from the botanical form. In the present instance only two leaves are set in each cluster; and the architect has been determined that the naturalism should be perfect. For he was no common man who designed that cathedral of Dunblane. I know not anything so perfect in its simplicity, and so beautiful, as far as it reaches, in all the Gothic with which I am acquainted. And just in proportion ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin

... the Carracci lay in their power of execution, and in a certain 'bold naturalism, or rather animalism,' which they added to their able imitations, for their pictures are not so much their own, as 'After Titian,' 'After Correggio,' etc. In this intent regard to style, and this perfecting of means to an ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... that lies nearest, and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the teacher is ever insisting. It is the Supernaturalism which stirs men first, until larger fulness of years and wider experience of life draw them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism. This last is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies of extolling and enjoining under the name of Belief; and the absence of it, the inability to enter into it, is that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or, in another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... Windsor Forest, 'the poetry of the period intervening between Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature,' and though the statement is hardly accurate, as it leaves Gay entirely out of account, it must be admitted that the simple naturalism of Lady Winchelsea's description is extremely remarkable. Passing on through Mrs. Sharp's collection, we come across poems by Lady Grisell Baillie; by Jean Adams, a poor 'sewing-maid in a Scotch manse,' who died in the Greenock Workhouse; by Isobel Pagan, 'an Ayrshire lucky, who ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... attempt to show us how, in the words of George Meredith: "Men have come out of brutishness." His theory of evolution is separated from Naturalism by his insistence on human freedom and on the supra-consciousness which is the origin of things; on the other hand, he is separated from the Idealists by his insistence upon the reality of la duree. He contrasts profoundly with Absolute Idealism. While in Hegel, Mind is the only truth of Nature, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease, crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a materialistic philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary resignation. But this disease of the times was as little a specifically ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various



Words linked to "Naturalism" :   art movement, philosophical theory, artistic movement, philosophy, naturalistic, realism, naturalist, philosophical doctrine



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com