| Ritualism | n. [ Cf. F. ritualisme. ] 1. A system founded upon a ritual or prescribed form of religious worship; adherence to, or observance of, a ritual. [ 1913 Webster ] 2. Specifically :(a) The principles and practices of those in the Church of England, who in the development of the Oxford movement, so-called, have insisted upon a return to the use in church services of the symbolic ornaments (altar cloths, encharistic vestments, candles, etc.) that were sanctioned in the second year of Edward VI., and never, as they maintain, forbidden by competennt authority, although generally disused. Schaff-Herzog Encyc. (b) Also, the principles and practices of those in the Protestant Episcopal Church who sympathize with this party in the Church of England. [ 1913 Webster ] |
| Spiritualism | n. 1. The quality or state of being spiritual. [ 1913 Webster ] 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. [ 1913 Webster ] 3. A belief that departed spirits hold intercourse with mortals by means of physical phenomena, as by rapping, 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. [ 1913 Webster ] What is called spiritualism should, I think, be called a mental species of materialism. R. H. Hutton. [ 1913 Webster ] |
