melioristn.adj.

1846 U.S. Mag. & Democratic Rev. Jan. 3/2 All the various orders, sects and schools of American meliorists may be included under one or another of these denominations [sc. of types of reformer].

1858 J. Brown Horæ Subsecivæ Pref. p. xix I am not however a pessimist, I am, I trust, a rational optimist, or at least a meliorist.

1877 ‘G. Eliot’ in J. W. Cross George Eliot's Life (1885) III. 301 I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word ‘meliorist’ except myself.

1885 J. W. Cross George Eliot's Life III. 309 In her general attitude toward life, George Eliot was neither optimist nor pessimist. She held to a middle term, which she invented for herself, of meliorist. She was cheered by the hope and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass.

1891 G. B. Shaw Quintessence of Ibsenism iv. 60 His prophetic belief in the spontaneous growth of the will makes him a meliorist without reference to the operation of natural selection.

1908 Westm. Gaz. 30 Sept. 3/1 Mr. Harrison is an optimist—or, as he prefers to call himself, a ‘meliorist’—and, like others of his kind, somewhat impatient of a too deliberate progress.

1968 Listener 26 Sept. 402/3 You might call me an old-fashioned social meliorist. If I didn't want to make changes I don't think I would write and I certainly would not be politically active.

1988 J. Bayley Short Story iv. 121 Chekhov is a meliorist, who can point reasonably to all sorts of ways in which things can get and are getting better.

1884 H. Spencer Man versus State iv. 96 If we adopt either the optimist view or the meliorist view—if we say that life on the whole brings more pleasure than pain; or that it is on the way to become such.

1944 G. B. Shaw Everybody's Polit. What's What? xxix. 249 Our geneticists are agreed that the secret of meliorist eugenics is the substitution of cross-breeding for in-breeding.

1991 Parl. Affairs 44 565 The alternative, meliorist, strategy would be to offer the Scots an Assembly, to create in effect an autonomous region on the Spanish model.