 Of the Scottish Idealists the most prominent and influential was Edward Caird (1835–1908). A graduate of the University of Glasgow, after a period at Oxford he returned in 1866 to become Glasgow's Professor of Moral Philosophy, a post he held for almost 30 years, before returning to Oxford to become Master of Balliol. Caird was an admirer of Kant, but believed that Kant had failed to capitalize fully on his own insights, and that the real import of his philosophy could be uncovered with the help of Hegel. The aim of philosophy, on this interpretation, was the ultimate reconciliation of seemingly incompatible elements in human experience—religion and science, freedom and causality, reason and desire, for instance, but above all and at its most abstract, subject and object (or mind and body). The employment of these distinctions is essential to making human experience intelligible, but once they are held to be absolute error and confusion arises. Materialism makes the distinction between mind and body absolute and seeks to explain the former in terms of the latter; Cartesianism works in reverse. Both result in rendering the relation mysterious.