Defence of Idealism

May Sinclair is best known for her psychologically acute Edwardian novels, but this 1916 treatise reveals a mind that refused to stay in its lane. Written in the teeth of the First World War, when Idealism had been pronounced dead by nearly everyone who mattered, Sinclair mounted a fierce defence of the ancient doctrine that reality is fundamentally mental. She didn't simply revive the old school she traced from Berkeley through Hegel and Schelling; she attempted something far more audacious: a synthesis of Idealistic Monism with the New Realism being pioneered by Bertrand Russell and his mathematically-inclined contemporaries. The result is a work that defies easy categorization, part rigorous philosophy and part intellectual autobiography. Sinclair brings the same psychological precision she applied to her fiction to the deepest questions of mind and matter. For readers curious about the forgotten alternatives to logical positivism, or women who dared to philosophize at the highest levels, this book is a revelation.