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/fˈɔrməlˌɪzəm/ Listen

Formalism

noun

The doctrine that formal structure rather than content is what should be represented. Antonym: imitation.

(philosophy) the philosophical theory that formal (logical or mathematical) statements have no meaning but that its symbols (regarded as physical entities) exhibit a form that has useful applications.

The practice of scrupulous adherence to prescribed or external forms.

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"Formalism" Quotes from Famous Books

... of the stamp of Goethe and Schiller should have found such a book of delicious feast, naturally makes the disparaging critic pause. In truth, we can easily see how it was. Like all the rest of Diderot's work, it breaks roughly in upon that starved formalism which had for long lain so heavily both on art and life. Its hardihood, its very license, its contempt of conventions, its presentation of common people and coarse passions and rough lives, all made it a dissolvent of the thin, dry, and frigid rules which tyrannised over the world, and interposed ...

— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... feeling of boredom may be imagined from the way in which his performance of Macbeth was once received. To those who remembered how magnificently Betterton had played the part, the chill formalism of the new aspirant must have seemed presumptuous, and one night the contrast proved too much for a country gentleman possessed of more honesty than politeness. After watching the progress of the tragedy with growing indignation his feelings became unbearable ...

— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... the excess of its religious ceremonial, robbed it of vital fructifying energies. The frequency and publicity of sacerdotal service, usurped the place of daily individual piety. The tendency of all outward symbolical observances, unduly multiplied, is to substitute mere formalism for fervor." ...

— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... is the religious formalism of the Eppings and their friends. They are High Church. They discuss with astonishing vigour and at dreadful length what seems to me the most immaterial points in the Church service, and just at present an impulse ...

— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... should condemn such a remark as a disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he warns us that our ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley

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