meliorative

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“
Beyond these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of evolution.

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Definitions (2)

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  1. Tending or serving to make better; that tends toward betterment. Here would come the so-called meliorative and pejorative developments in word-meaning, whereby, e.g., steward, “the sty-ward,” becomes the title of a great officer of the realm and the name of a line of kings; or, on the other side, sou (Lat. solidus) passes from the name of a gold coin to that of one of proverbially insignificant value. Encyc. Brit., XXXI. 678.

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Examples (7)

  • In times of crisis such as the collapse of an economic system there are bound to be social and political movements for change-ranging from meliorative to systemic.
  • They with you, nullified you tips, spirant your damn erythrite, stillbirth you to meliorative new trail and flatboat. —  Rational Review
  • It is also well to remember that a prevalent animistic habit of thought in viewing the events of life, whether it take the form of a belief in luck, as in gamblers and sporting men, or the form of a belief in supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one increasing purpose runs," tends, by retarding the prompt perception of relations of material cause and effect, to lower the industrial efficiency of the community. [ —  Socialism: Positive and Negative
  • Beyond these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of evolution. —  Theory of the Leisure Class
  • Their effect might be traced through the entire range of that schedule of non-invidious, meliorative enterprise that is so considerable a feature, and especially so conspicuous a feature, in the overt scheme of life of the well-to-do. —  Theory of the Leisure Class
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