ABSTRACT
By the end of the ’seventies the results of the Kantian and post-Kantian criticism were familiar to students of philosophy in England, and were the rallying-ground of the movement generally known as Neo-Kantian. From the side of idealistic philosophy nothing had been written, scarcely anything from the side of any philosophy, upon aesthetic theory since the time of Coleridge. True Ruskin and Morris were giving new life to the appreciation of beauty in fine art. It was a sign of the force and comprehensiveness of the Hegelian movement that it made itself felt not only in the reconstruction of the more strictly philosophical sciences, but in the more philosophical spirit it introduced into British scholarship in other fields. British Idealism from the first has been in essence a philosophy of religion. At each stage in its development it has recognized, as the final test of its truth, its power of explaining without explaining away man’s religious consciousness.
