ABSTRACT
A century ago, wrote David Stove, the vast majority of English-speaking philosophers had been idealists, though nowadays the species was almost wholly extinct; and yet it was not obvious that our contemporaries were any more intelligent or well-informed than their predecessors. Two chapters of The Plato Cult are devoted to an account of British nineteenth-century idealism, and its role in giving a temporary respite to those who could no longer stomach traditional Christianity, but were not yet prepared for a thoroughly secular outlook. This chapter argues that the facts about human consciousness and knowledge to which the idealists drew attention can only be reconciled with the assumptions both of science and of common sense, if something close to certain traditional religious views is true. Idealism “provided an important holding-station or decompression chamber, for that century’s vast flood of intellectual refugees from Christianity.”
