The belief that improvement of society depends on human effort.
In 1877, British novelist George Eliot wrote, "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself." Her comtemporaries credited her with coining both "meliorist" and "meliorism", and one of her letters contains the first documented use of "meliorism", but there is evidence that at least "meliorist" had been around for 20 years or so before Eliot started using it. Whoever coined it did so by drawing on the Latin melior, meaning "better". It is likely that the English coinages were also influenced by another melior descendant, "meliorate", a synonyn of "ameliorate" ("to make better") that was introduced to English in the mid-1500s.
