Spiritualism word meaning and definition

[noun] the belief that the spirits of dead people can communicate with people who are still alive (especially via a medium)
[noun] any doctrine that asserts the separate existence of God

\Spir"it*u*al*ism\, n. 1. The quality or state of being spiritual. 2. (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. 3. 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.

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