idealism, in philosophy, any view that stresses the central role of the ideal or the spiritual in the interpretation of experience. It may hold that the world or reality exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are more fundamental in reality than sensory things, or, at least, that whatever exists is known in dimensions that are chiefly mental—through and as ideas.
Thus, the two basic forms of idealism are metaphysical idealism, which asserts the ideality of reality, and epistemological idealism, which holds that in the knowledge process the mind can grasp only the psychic or that its objects are conditioned by their perceptibility. In its metaphysics, idealism is thus directly opposed to materialism, the view that the basic substance of the world is matter and that it is known primarily through and as material forms and processes. In its epistemology, it is opposed to realism, which holds that in human knowledge objects are grasped and seen as they really are—in their existence outside and independently of the mind.
As a philosophy often expressed in bold and expansive syntheses, idealism is also opposed to various restrictive forms of thought: to skepticism, with occasional exceptions as in the work of the modern British Hegelian F.H. Bradley; to positivism, which stresses observable facts and relations as opposed to ultimates and therefore spurns the speculative “pretensions” of every metaphysics; and often to atheism, since the idealist commonly extrapolates the concept of mind to embrace an infinite Mind. The essential orientation of idealism can be sensed through some of its typical tenets: “Truth is the whole, or the Absolute”; “to be is to be perceived”; “reality reveals its ultimate nature more faithfully in its highest qualities (mental) than in its lowest (material)”; “the Ego is both subject and object.”