meliorist

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“
No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth.

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Definitions (3)

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  1. One who accepts the practical or the theoretical doctrine of meliorism. I am not, however, a pessimist—I am, I trust, a rational optimist, or at least a meliorist. Dr. J. Brown, Spare Hours, 3d ser., p. 27. In her general attitude toward life, George Eliot was neither optimist, nor pessimist. She held to the middle term, which she invented for herself, of meliorist. She was cheered by the hope and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass. Cross, Life of George Eliot, III. 309. I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word meliorist except myself. George Eliot, Letter to James Sully, Jan. 17, 1877.
  2. Of or pertaining to meliorism or meliorists. If we adopt either the optimist view or the meliorist view—if we say that life on the whole brings more pleasure than pain, or that it is on the way to become such that it will yield more pleasure than pain, then these actions by which life is maintained are justified, and there results a warrant for the freedom to perform them. H. Spencer, Man vs. State, p. 96.

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Examples (11)

  • He mocked the pretensions of the Crystal Palace and the meliorist theorists of his day, and pointed to our innate perversity, our tendency to make a mess of things when we can; moreover, he celebrated this perversity as our most precious quality, that which kept us from being turned into calibrated, programmed piano keys. —  California Literary Review
  • No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. —  Recent Developments in European Thought
  • There's something about Chichester which shakes my nerves And you haven't got nervous dyspepsia Should I be even a meliorist--as I am--if I had I must know Chichester. —  The Dweller on the Threshold
  • A pessimist I may be, but it is the habitually hopeful meliorist who is just now perplexed past power to think straight John's interest was caught for the moment by the word, "meliorist." —  Westways
  • "What is a meliorist, sir?" —  Westways
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Etymologies (1)

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  1. from Latin melior, better, + English -ist.
 

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