Synonyms:
materialism, philistinism
Meaning: a desire for wealth and material possessions with little interest in ethical or spiritual matters
Usage examples
Some of the best known of these solutions bear the names of spiritualism, materialism, parallelism, and monism.
The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil.
It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.