PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY – Idealism

Idealism is the name given to the creed of Berkeley and those who with him deny the reality of matter, also to those who denied the immediacy of the object in the act of perception, holding that there intervenes between the one and the other, a mental representation or idea. In this regard that of their opponents, the majority of mankind, is called realism, a different use of the term from the mediaeval, in which it is opposed to nominalism.