The British Idealists

British Idealism came to the fore in the 1870s, by which time the figures of Mill and Hamilton were fast disappearing into history. Hence the Idealists’ two-fronted war on agnosticism and empiricism was conducted against more contemporary representatives such as Spencer and Huxley on the one hand, and Bain and Lewes on the other. But at the same time as criticizing rival approaches, more positively—both in theory and through the actual construction of bold metaphysical systems—the Idealists urged the potential of reason adequately to understand reality; for in their eyes the former was something fundamentally of a piece with the latter. The British Idealist movement lasted several decades and took in a great many names, but this chapter confines its attention to just four representative figures, John and Edward Caird, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, and Henry Jones.