Spiritualism

An idealistic philosophy that advocates the rule of spirit over nature, which is closely related to religious mysticism. Spiritualists hold that the soul and spirit are the essence of the world and the soul is the only entity that does not depend on the body, and that the body is the product of the soul.

Spiritualism first appeared in Germany in the second half of the19 th century, and then became popular in western European countries such as Britain and France. The word “spiritualism” is often used as a synonym for idealism. Spiritualists claim that all objects have souls. The earth has “the earth soul” and the world has “the world soul”. The so-called “world soul” is large enough to include everything, and therefore is God. Other souls are a small part of this large soul. Spiritualists have argued that the world exists only as the appearance of the soul, and the world is unified only inside the great soul of God.

Spiritualists often use various tricks to “show” the existence of spirits. In some cities in modern Europe, the scam of “spirit summoning” was once overwhelming. For example, Wallace, a British natural scientist, used deceptive tricks and superstition such as mesmerism, phrenology and séance to prove the immortality of the soul and the existence of God.

Dialectical materialism holds that the idea of the existence of soul in the human body originated from the era of obscurantism when the social productive forces level was extremely low. At that time, people could not explain the phenomena in dreams and the relationship between mind and body. In class society, thinkers of the exploiting class systematized and mystified people’s superstitions for the benefit of their own class and put forward spiritualism to paralyze people’s will and imprison people’s thoughts in the shackles of religious superstition. Engels, in his book Dialectics of Nature, specially wrote an article titled “Natural Science and the Spirit World”, which criticized modern spiritualism deeply. Taking how natural scientists bound by empiricism fell into spiritualism as an example, Engels proved in a vivid way that “dialectics cannot be despised with impunity”, and pointed out sharply that, “It (spiritualism) is not the extravagant theorising of the philosophy of nature, but the shallowest empiricism that spurns all theory and distrusts all thought.”