Philosophy and Ideas

There were two great philosophical or ideological problems of the nineteenth century: the problem of idealism and materialism, and that of freedom and determinism. The first, deriving from advances in the social and natural sciences, especially psychology, logic, geology and biology, was concerned with how to reconcile materialism with idealism and spiritualism. What was the relation of human thought to matter? How did biblical time relate to historical evolution? Could scripture be married with natural science? Victorian notions of reason and progress were informed by Immanuel Kant’s idealism in the domains of the Good (ethics), the True (science) and the Beautiful (aesthetics) — that we could not perceive the truth of nature unmediated by our own perceptual and cognitive apparatuses, that the world was rational and progressive, and that the human mind was capable of discerning the Good and acting on it.