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hylopathy

hylopathy noun: the ability of a spirit to penetrate and affect matter.

Noun

hylopathy (uncountable)

  1. (obsolete) The ability of a spirit to penetrate and affect matter.
    • And this affection of a Spirit we will make bold to call, for more compendiousness, by one Greek term ὑλοπάθεια which, that there may be no suspicion of any fraud or affected foolery in words, we will as plainly as we can define thus, A power in a Spirit of offering so near to a corporeal emanation...1662, Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, Appendix, Chapter 3
    • Which Faculty of Spirits, in the Appendix to the Antidote against Atheism is called ὑλοπάθεια, the Hylopathy of Spirits, or a Power of affecting, or being affected by the Matter.1726, Joseph Glanvill, Sadducismus trimphatus, page 99

Origin of hylopathy

From hylo- + -pathy, after the model of Ancient Greek ὑλοπάθεια (hulopátheia), from ὕλη (húlē, “wood, matter”) + πᾰ́σχειν (pắskhein, “to experience, to feel, to suffer”) + -εια (-eia, “-ia: forming nouns”).

Questions about hylopathy

What does hylopathy mean?
Hylopathy means the ability of a spirit to penetrate and affect matter.
What part of speech is hylopathy?
Hylopathy is a noun.

Words near hylopathy in the dictionary

  1. hylomorphous
  2. hylopathic
  3. hylopathism
  4. hylopathist
  5. hylopathists
  6. hylopathy
  7. hylophagous
  8. hylophobia
  9. hylophyte
  10. hylophytes
  11. hylotheism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hylopathy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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