materialism

Definition

Constant concern over material possessions and wealth; a great or excessive regard for worldly concerns.

Etymology

Borrowed from French matérialisme. By surface analysis, material + -ism.

Example Sentences

• "We accept that a third of the population live on the poverty line. We accept that only a handful of the most exceptional of the children of the poor will make it through to a third-level education. We accept massive examples of greed and dishonesty in public life. We except the values of materialism. What do we expect then—to be left un-harassed, we who have all the privileges?"
• "The result of the labours of philosophy appeared to be a total scepticism on the most important subjects of hu man duty and expectation. The irregular fears of a future state had been supplanted by the materialism of Epicurus; and this system—if system it may be called, which left them without a God, a providence, a morality, or a retribution—was the fashionable philosophy of the more cultivated classes."
• "Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. ... All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover."

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