idealisticadj.

1824 Encycl. Brit. Suppl. IV. 247/1 The Kantian theory was confessedly idealistic.

1877 E. Caird Crit. Acct. Philos. Kant Introd. iv. 71 The idealistic individualism of Leibnitz.

1927 M. R. Cohen in Proc. 6th Internat. Congr. Philos., 1926 471 The same system of legal rights and duties may be expressible in positivistic or in idealistic language.

1960 E. G. Ballard in A. Brinkley et al. Stud. in Hegel 165 It will be convenient to begin with a brief consideration of his [sc. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's] criticism of the Realistic and Idealistic traditions in philosophy.

2001 G. J. Dorrien Making of Amer. Liberal Theol. I. iv. 243 Critical realistic monism steered a careful path between his accounting of the fallacies, subjectivisms, and abstractionisms of idealistic philosophy.

1829 T. Carlyle Novalis in Crit. & Misc. Ess. (1872) II. 207 As a Poet, Novalis is no less Idealistic than as a Philosopher.

1842 Foreign Q. Rev. Oct. 136/2 These tendencies, in a word, are no longer the property of some learned men, or the idealistic dreams of a few exalted poets.

1880 G. Gissing Workers in Dawn I. xiii. 296 The prospect of being kept rather too long out of her inheritance might excite curious designs in the mind of such a very idealistic young lady.

1884 Fortn. Rev. Jan. 31 The best of all practical work is that produced in an idealistic spirit.

1919 P. Grainger Let. 12 Mar. in All-round Man (1994) 47 Against this mob-tyranny only the idealistic blind instinct for self-sacrifice lifts its head, in its turn as hysterical, as irrational as the mob itself.

1954 E. Huxley Four Guineas (1955) 278 He seems quite free from personal ambition and from avarice, and to follow Gandhi's teachings of non-violence and simple living... I asked a European friend of his how a man so idealistic and undemagogic could have won such popular esteem.

1977 V. S. Naipaul India: Wounded Civilization ii. iv. 93 He said that in the Naxalite movement India had lost the best of a whole generation, the most educated and idealistic of its young people.

2005 T. Hall Salaam Brick Lane iii. 53 Abdul-Haq's idealistic image of England was soon shattered. He had arrived during the Winter of Discontent.

1937 P. A. Sorokin Social & Cultural Dynamics I. i. ii. 68 Some [cultures] have contained a balanced synthesis of both pure types. This last I term the Idealistic type of culture. (It should not be confused with the Ideational.)

1952 A. L. Kroeber Nature of Culture i. xviii. 165/2 These ‘sensate’, ‘ideational’, and ‘idealistic’ supersystems are not segments of cultures at all... They are essentially polar qualities.

1998 Jrnl. Law & Society 25 418 P. Sorokin explores the variability of law when it forms part of ideational, sensate, and idealistic cultures.