Nihilism, the principles of a movement on the part of the educated classes in Russia which repudiates the existing creed and organisation of society, and insists on a root and branch wholesale abolition of them and a reconstruction of them on communistic principles, and for the purely secular and everyday ends of common life, subordinating everything in the first place to the feeding, clothing, and lodging of human beings in a manner worthy of their rank in the scale of being. The term Nihilism is also applied to those philosophical systems which sweep the course clear of all incredibilities and irrationalities, but leave us bare of all our inherited spiritual possessions.