[f. prec. + -ISM. Cf. Fr. fatalisme, It. fatalismo.]
1. The belief in fatality; the doctrine that all things are determined by fate; a particular form of this doctrine.
In early use not distinguished from ‘the doctrine of necessity,’ i.e., the doctrine that all events take place in accordance with unvarying laws of causation. In strict etymological propriety, and in the best modern usage, it is restricted to the view which regards events as predetermined by an arbitrary decree.
1678. Cudworth, Intell. Syst., 6. We shall oppose those three Fatalisms … as so many false Hypotheses of the Mundane System and Oeconomy.
1733. Berkeley, Th. Vision, § 6. Pantheism, Materialism, Fatalism are nothing but Atheism a little disguised.
1774. Fletcher, Hist. Ess., Wks. 1795, IV. 20. Fatalism, in which the greatest Infidels unanimously shelter themselves.
1829. Lytton, Devereux, II. v. You are, then, a believer in the fatalism of Spinosa?
1876. L. Stephen, Eng. Thought 18th Cent. (1881), I. 298. Fatalism assumes what necessity excludes, the existence of an arbitrary element in the universe.
2. Acquiescence in the decree of fate; submission to everything that happens as inevitable.
a. 1734. North, Lives, III. 61, marg. A Turk convinced against fatalism.
1835. Thirlwall, Greece, I. vi. 194. The fatalism of the Greeks was very remote … from the dogma.
1871. Morley, Carlyle, Crit. Misc. (1878), 188. This acquiescence which is really not so far removed from fatalism.
