A report on Absolute (philosophy), British idealism and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

While the general concept of a supreme being has been present since ancient times, the exact term "Absolute" was first introduced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and features prominently in the work of many of his followers.

In Absolute idealism and British idealism, it serves as a concept for the "unconditioned reality which is either the spiritual ground of all being or the whole of things considered as a spiritual unity".

British idealism was generally marked by several broad tendencies: a belief in an Absolute (a single all-encompassing reality that in some sense formed a coherent and all-inclusive system); the assignment of a high place to reason as both the faculty by which the Absolute's structure is grasped and as that structure itself; and a fundamental unwillingness to accept a dichotomy between thought and object, reality consisting of thought-and-object together in a strongly coherent unity.

British idealism largely developed from the German idealist movement—particularly such philosophers as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, who were characterised by Green, among others, as the salvation of British philosophy after the alleged demise of empiricism.

Hegel understood the history of philosophy to be a trans-historical Socratic argument concerning the identity of the Absolute.

It profoundly impacted many future philosophical schools, including those opposed to Hegel's specific dialectical idealism, such as existentialism, the historical materialism of Marx, historism and British Idealism.