hylozoism, (from Greek hylē, “matter”; zōē, “life”), in philosophy, any system that views all matter as alive, either in itself or by participation in the operation of a world soul or some similar principle. Hylozoism is logically distinct both from early forms of animism, which personify nature, and from panpsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness or sensation to all matter.
Throughout the history of thought hylozoistic interpretations of nature have been common. Early Greek thinkers sought the beginning of all things in various material substances. Thus, Thales considered water as the primary substance and saw all things as “full of gods”; for Anaximenes, air was the universal animating principle of the world, and for Heracleitus it was fire. All of these elements were regarded as in some sense living, or even divine, and taking an active part in the development of being. When the Peripatetic Straton reduced all of reality to matter and all psychic activity to motion, he likewise vitalized matter.
Modified forms of early hylozoism reappeared in medieval and Renaissance thought, though it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a hylozoist from a panpsychist. The word hylozoism was coined in the 17th century by Ralph Cudworth, a Cambridge Platonist, who with Henry More (also a Cambridge Platonist) spoke of “plastic nature,” an unconscious, incorporeal substance that controls and organizes matter (somewhat like a plant soul in vegetation) and thus produces natural events as a divine instrument of change.
Denis Diderot, Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, and J.B. Robinet, 18th-century Encyclopaedists, espoused a dynamic, materialistic view of nature (not unlike that of Straton), which was later adapted by 19th-century evolutionist philosophers. Ernst Haeckel, for example, maintained that all matter must contain life if life derives from matter—a position soon challenged by emergent evolutionism (see also emergence).