Bible Dictionaries
Naturism

1910 New Catholic Dictionary

Term designating the worship of nature, which, according to the claim of some modern philosophers, e.g., Tylor, Spencer, and Reville, was the primitive form of religion and the basis and source of all existing forms. There are three phases of Naturism as a theory of religion.

• Ethnographic Naturism holds that there is human life in all things, both animate and inanimate.
• Philosophic Naturism, based on the idea that there is unity in animated nature and that God is the soul of the world, is the essence of Pantheism, the Neo-Hegelian school, and Transcendentalism.
• Science-Naturism teaches the identity of God with nature, the veneration and service of humanity or mankind, and the contemplation of the mysterious and unknown powers of the world.