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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








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"Naturalism" Quotes from Famous Books



... and ethics than it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but romantic. "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his feelings[4] by describing some past state of society. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... his, the love of nature which we ascribe to the ordinary realist is a superficial emotion. He had the sentiment of reality in the highest degree; he had it intensely. If he did not represent nature with the searching subtlety of later painters, he is certainly the forerunner of naturalism. He has absolutely no ideality. He is blind to all intimations of immortality, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... 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 end, thought ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not exist, as a ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... great success, The Disciple of the Teutons. Erik Skram (b. 1847) had in 1879 written a solitary novel, Gertrude Coldbjrnsen, which created a sensation, and was hailed by Brandes as exactly representing the "naturalism" which he desired to see encouraged; but Skram has written little else of importance. Other writers of reputation in the naturalistic school were Edvard Brandes (b. 1847), and Herman Bang (b. 1858). Peter Nansen (b. 1861) has come into wide notoriety as the author, in particularly beautiful ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... the second place, there are the transitory, changing opinions, the outcome, as a rule, of general conceptions, of which every age sees the birth and disappearance; examples in point are the theories which mould literature and the arts—those, for instance, which produced romanticism, naturalism, mysticism, &c. Opinions of this order are as superficial, as a rule, as fashion, and as changeable. They may be compared to the ripples which ceaselessly arise and vanish on the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... is once again a local style of Persian painting which forms the starting point. This style is no longer the Turkman style of Shiraz but a later style—a local version of Safavid painting as current in Khurasan. With its lively and delicate naturalism it not only corresponded to certain predilections of the emperor Akbar himself, but seems also to have appealed to Indian artists recruited to the colony. Its representational finesse made it an ideal medium for transcribing the Indian scene and the appearance at the court ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... the Gothic niches traced above them; and what is left of arabesque on their armour. They are far more beautiful and tender in chivalric conception than Donatello's St. George, which is merely a piece of vigorous naturalism founded on these older tombs. If you will drive in the evening to the Chartreuse in Val d'Ema, you may see there an uninjured example of this slab-tomb by Donatello himself; very beautiful; but not so perfect as the earlier ones on which it ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin

... misquotation from a well-known philosopher, in this line, is, however, sufficiently noteworthy for special mention here. Jacobi, in his intense theism, protests against the unqualified idealism of Fichte, and the indefinite naturalism of Schelling; and, in his famous Letter to Fichte,[1] he says vehemently: "But the Good what is it? I have no answer if there be no God. As to me, this world of phenomena—if it have all its truth in these phenomena, and ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull

... if it never could do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal; an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market; and, finally, a profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe, rising out of that Naturalism whose operation we have already endeavoured to define. The sculptor who sought for his models among the forest leaves, could not but quickly and deeply feel that complexity need not involve the loss of grace, nor richness that of repose; and every hour which he spent in the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, "That is Manichasism," or "It is Arianism," or "Pelagianism," or "Idealism," or "Spinozism," or "Pantheism," or "Brownianism," or "Naturalism," or "Atheism," or "Rationalism," "Spiritualism," "Mysticism," and so on. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with, or is at least contained ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer

... of naturalism against the too rigid, and, oft-times, absurd restrictions established ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... Sentimentale, while his very style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic periods—is not all this the beginning of that symbolism carried to such lengths by Verlaine and his followers? Shakespeare himself ranged from gross naturalism to the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... Such had been for ages the last lessons of all the 'mysteries' of the East—mysteries which it was the peculiar destiny of the Hebrew race to resist through ages of struggle. It was through the teaching of such mysteries of pantheistic naturalism that, as the unflinching Jewish deists and anthropomorphists believed, man fell, and their belief was set forth in their very first religious tradition—the history of the apple, the serpent, and the Fall. And it is to the very extraordinary nature of the Hebrew ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... teaching of England, to say nothing of less civilised nations, is not Naturalism but Theism. We are told that there is a God over all, and that he doeth all things well. On the practical side this deity is called Providence. It is Providence that sends fine weather, and Providence that sends ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... culture and differentiated it from all Orientalism, including even the loftiest Indian philosophy. Every attempt to substitute for this fundamental concept and its emotional content something else—whether it be pantheism, Buddhism, or naturalism—will always ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted; though here, as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... refined districts which had never heard the principles of this society, much less felt them. They were not popular anywhere in the age in which they were inaugurated. Therefore they were not founded in nature, and the claim of naturalism must fall to the ground. The taste for the beautiful, and the love of right, were innate faculties of the mind, because they existed everywhere; not so with the recognition of the claim of Woman's Rights. Again, the claim was ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... then. He is the Master of Naturalism in Italy. And I have drawn for you his lioness and cubs, to fix that in your minds. And beside it, I put the Lion of St. Mark's, that you may see exactly the kind of change he made. The Lion of St. Mark's (all but his wings, which have been made and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... the meaning of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" in poetry, realism in art, tragedy in music, scepticism in religion, cynicism in politics, and pessimism in philosophy, all spring from the same root. They are the means by which the age records its ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... appearance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races. The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic. But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a delicious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite—the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare and a Goethe should express in later times. It was neither theology nor moral philosophy—it was a ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... present the greatest difficulty to the advancing explanations of science. Now, in our own day there are but very few of these strongholds of the miraculous left. Nearly the whole field of explanation is occupied by naturalism, so that no one ever thinks of resorting to supernaturalism except in the comparatively few cases where science has not yet been able to explore the most obscure regions of causation. One of these cases is the origin of life; and, until quite recently, another of these ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... singular lack of sympathy with actors. Nor was he able to win great success with his first book of importance, Le Petit Chose, delightful as that mixture of autobiography and romance must prove to any sympathetic reader. He was essentially a romanticist and a poet cast upon an age of naturalism and prose, and he needed years of training and such experience as the Prussian invasion gave him to adjust himself to his life-work. Such adjustment was not needed for Tartarin de Tarascon, begun shortly after ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... began in primitive delusion. How comes it that this idea has not by now disappeared from civilised society? What are the causes that have given it such a lengthy lease of life? Experience has shown that all really verifiable knowledge counts as an asset of naturalism, and is so far opposed to supernaturalism. Moreover, the history of science has been such that one feels justified in the assumption that, given time and industry, there are no phenomena that are not susceptible to a naturalistic explanation. Why, then, has not ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... his stories, because it explains, though it does not excuse, the contempt the Goncourts had for the favor of the great French public, and also because it shows how the highest form of Romanticism still ferments beneath the varnish of Naturalism in what is called genius among the great masses ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... meant to be this. The sudden and universal Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... sentiment. In Mr. Tennyson alone, as we think, the spirit of the Middle Age is perfectly reflected; its delight, not in the "sublime and picturesque," but in the green leaves and spring flowers for their own sake—the spirit of Chaucer and of the "Robin Hood Garland"—the naturalism which revels as much in the hedgerow and garden as in Alps, and cataracts, and Italian skies, and the other strong stimulants to the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of an unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... that many of us 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 descriptions, cut out the reflections, coupez vos phrases. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers

... Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, and Victor Cherbuliez, with his Comte Kostia, endeavoured to perpetuate idealism or at least to recreate it in other forms. And then there were independents, like Flaubert who, with Madame Bovary, passed realism by on his way to naturalism. Yet it is worth remarking that Flaubert made a sort of volte face in 1869, and wrote his Education Sentimentale, in which, under the pressure of simple circumstance, the hero descends gradually from the soaring of youth's hopes and ambitions to the dull, dun ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... Euripides in the person of his disciple. It is at the same time an attack upon him; and in either capacity it covers a great deal of ground. For the dispute does not lie simply between comedy and tragedy—which latter, with the old tragedians, was often only the naturalism of comedy on a larger scale—but between naturalism and humanity, as more advanced thinkers understood it; between the old ideas of human and divine conveyed by tragedy and comedy alike, and the new ones which Euripides, the friend of Socrates, had imported into them; and the question ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... of these views I may be allowed to refer to my' Ethics of Naturalism,' chap. viii. (chap. ix. in the new edition). The same volume contains a more exhaustive examination than is possible in this lecture of the whole subject ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... the historic record of his life. As presented by Webster, he is doubtless an execrable ruffian: as presented by history, he would be intolerable by any but such readers or spectators as those on whom the figments or the photographs of self-styled naturalism produce other than emetic emotions. Here again the noble instinct of the English poet has rectified the aesthetic unseemliness of an ignoble reality. This "Brachiano" is a far more living figure than the porcine paramour of the historic Accoramboni. I am not ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... matter out, here and there, "with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story." No "padding" for Miss Austen! in fact, madam, as you were born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation. Your heroines are not passionate, we do not see their red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the manner ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... and metaphor with which his sermons were adorned, and which were drawn chiefly from natural objects, from his orchard, his farm, his garden, as well as from machinery and from all kinds of natural processes; his naturalism and absence of theological bias; his knowledge of average men and their ways of looking at things; in a word, his general fertility of thought, filling up, as it did, the full horizon of my mind, and running over and beyond it on all sides, so that wherever I looked he had been there before ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... in 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 ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman



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



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