Absolute Idealism

Abstract

Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, philosophy of religion had focused on the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Developments in the empirical sciences and in the empirical type of philosophy which dominated British thought during this period, however, challenged the validity of the arguments and helped open the way to religious scepticism. Thomas Reid (1710–1796) and William Hamilton (1788–1856) sought to overcome this scepticism, but the appeal to common sense belief on the one hand and to an unknowable absolute on the other hand provided little comfort for many nineteenth century British philosophers who wanted to avoid both religious scepticism and the appeal to religious authority. Their dissatisfaction with the available alternatives helped prepare the way for a resurrection of German Idealism in British philosophy some twenty years after its death in Germany. In the 1840s and 1850s many British students were reading the literary works of Carlyle, Coleridge and Emerson, and there had been early skirmishes with idealism in the work of the Scottish philosopher, J.F. Ferrier (1808–1864). Ferrier, however, often despaired in his efforts to unearth the secret of Hegel and was not himself able to establish a school of idealism.