[f. as prec. + -IST. Cf. Fr. fataliste.]
1. One who holds the doctrine of fatalism; one who believes that all things happen by inevitable necessity.
1650. R. Gell, Serm., 8 Aug., 38. The most notorious Fatalists.
1722. Wollaston, Relig. Nat., v. 105. They [the ancients] were generally fatalists, and yet do not seem to have thought, that they were not masters of their own actions.
1887. T. Fowler, Princ. Morals, II. ix. The Fatalist, as distinguished from the Determinist, imagines himself to be completely at the mercy of some external power.
2. One whose conduct is regulated by fatalism; one who accepts every event as an inevitable necessity.
a. 1734. North, Lives, III. 61. It is commonly known that the Turks are fatalists.
1763. Scrafton, Indostan (1770), 115–6. Those who know what strong fatalists these eastern people are, who look on fighting against a fortunate man, as contending with GOD HIMSELF.
1848. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., II. 185. The confidence which the heroic fatalist placed in his high destiny.
1883. Ouida, Wanda, I. 202. ‘What a fatalist you are!’
3. attrib. or adj. = next.
1843. J. Martineau, Endeavours After the Christian Life (1867), 407. Every Fatalist or Predestinarian scheme destroys merit by denying that our actions are our own, and referring them wholly to powers of which we are not lords but slaves.
1850. Kingsley, Alt. Locke, i. He preached ‘higher doctrine,’ i. e. more fatalist and antinomian than his gentler colleague.
1865. W. Collins, Armadale, in The Cornhill Magazine, April, 403. His head sank on his breast; and the fatalist resignation which had once already quieted him on board the Wreck, now quieted him again.
1874. Lady Herbert, trans. Hübner’s Ramble, II. ii. (1878), 515–6. ‘The moral basis of society in this country,’ they say, ‘lies in a fatalist submission to the will of the sovereign, as long as it is the will of Heaven that he should reign.’
