hylozoism

Noun

hylozoism (countable and uncountable, plural hylozoisms)

1. The belief that all physical matter is alive in some sense.
   • Hylozoism... makes all Body, as such, and therefore every smallest Atom of it, to have Life Essentially belonging to it.1678, Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe..., page 105
   • But we can answer authoritatively that to Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if not to Zeno, there was no real difference between matter and its cause, which is always a corporeal current, and therefore matter, although the finest and subtlest matter. In fact they have reached the final result of unveiled...1887, Robert Drew Hicks, Stoics, 9th edition, volume XXII, Encyclopaedia Britannica, page 563

   Synonyms:

   panbiotism

2. Synonym of materialism, the belief that all life derives entirely from physical matter.
   • […] is it not melancholy to hear a man like Steffens somniloquise in such a mystifying cant of Hylozoism, of Pickism, a hodge-podge of the grossest materialism, and the most fantastic yet maudlin moonery?a. 1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia

   Synonyms:

   materialism