hylozoism

plural hylozoisms

1. countableuncountableThe belief that all physical matter is alive in some sense.

   Hylozoism... makes all Body, as such, and therefore every smallest Atom of it, to have Life Essentially belonging to it.

   1678, Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe..., page 105

   1 more example

   But we can answer authoritatively that to Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if not to Zeno, there was no real difference between matter and its cause, which is always a corporeal current, and therefore matter, although the finest and subtlest matter. In fact they have reached the final result of unveiled hylozoism, from which the distinction of the active and passive principles is discerned to be a merely formal concession to Aristotle, a legacy from his dualistic doctrine.

   1887, Robert Drew Hicks, Stoics, 9th edition, volume XXII, Encyclopaedia Britannica, page 563

   Synonyms: panbiotism

2. countableuncountableSynonym of materialism, the belief that all life derives entirely from physical matter.

   […] is it not melancholy to hear a man like Steffens somniloquise in such a mystifying cant of Hylozoism, of Pickism, a hodge-podge of the grossest materialism, and the most fantastic yet maudlin moonery?

   a. 1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia

   Synonyms: materialism