actualismn.

1849 Brownson's Q. Rev. Apr. 212 The real as distinguished from the ideal is precisely what is meant by the actual. His Realism, then, is Actualism.

a1875 J. Hinton Philos. & Relig. (1881) i. 2 The sole true existence is the actual; and..this material, or real is our way of perceiving it. This last is actualism.

1882 Academy 14 Jan. 29 It is the central doctrine of Actualism, that self-sacrifice for others is the law of life and conduct.

1921 Jrnl. Philos. 18 410 Idealism..transforms itself, before our eyes, into an almost brutal actualism, and bows down in reverence before whatever has the good fortune to exist.

1958 R. L. Cook Dimensions of Robert Frost iv. ii. 101 Whitman's identification with the multidimensional world appears exaggerated and self-intoxicated beside Frost's self-restricted actualism.

1997 Z. Bechler in M. Sintonen Knowl. & Inq. i. 13 Aristotle's actualism entails that scientific explanation must be objectively non-informative.

1872 Scribner's Monthly June 158/1 Hogarth..remained a non-conformist to all the conventional notions of representation of nature, as to the trivial actualism of the Dutch schools.

1931 Times 9 Dec. 10/2 It is a thing of such beauty that its qualities should make it more widely known to those who desire something more than theatrical actualism.

1961 W. C. Seitz Art of Assemblage 83 Just such extreme actualism—i.e., the inclusion of a Coca-Cola bottle rather than the representation of one—is intrinsic to assemblage.

1999 Compar. Drama 33 511 Their depiction represented a sharp move from idealization to gritty, if conventionalized, actualism.

1874 Pop. Sci. Monthly May 23 Were we able to create the conditions under which organic beings had their rise,..then, according to the principle of actualism, we could produce organic beings now in the same way that they were first produced.

1902 Nature 18 Dec. 148/2 The author [sc. Stanislas Meunier] defines the ideas which have successively dominated geological theory during the nineteenth century as (1) the cataclysmal views of Cuvier; (2) the uniformitarianism of Lyell; (3) the ‘actualism’ of Constant Prévost; and (4) the ‘activism’, which he regards as the distinctive feature of modern geological thought.

1954 S. I. Tomkeieff tr. F. Y. Loewinson-Lessing Hist. Surv. Petrol. ii. 14 The principle of actualism, i.e. the present is the key to the past, is the fundamental postulate of modern geology.

1970 Kon. Nederl. Akad. v. Wetensch. Afd. Letterkunde 30 No. 2. 272 In continental European languages.., though the term ‘actualism’ is considered as synonymous with the anglosaxon ‘uniformitarianism’, it often has somewhat wider implications. For the term in itself implies only that the present (modern or actual) causes are sufficient to explain the events of the past; it does not necessarily include the idea that they operate with the same energy..as they did in the past.

2001 Isis 92 197/1 Prior to Darwin's publication, it was widely held that one could study the past development of languages by accepting Lyellian actualism and Herschel's vera causae.