  British idealism was the dominant philosophical movement in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Its best-known representatives—philosophers of the like of Thomas Hill Green and Francis Herbert Bradley—held a version of Absolute idealism, the theory that reality is a single unified consciousness or cosmic experience. The doctrine has its roots in the philosophies of Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, but the British idealists elaborated it in independent, original ways. In this, they were motivated by a desire to oppose materialism and vindicate our instinctive belief that human life has a meaning. As Bradley forcefully put it in his Logic, “that the glory of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendor; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms […]” (Bradley 1883: 590).