Antedating of "Idealism"

[Fred Shapiro]

idealism (OED 1796)

1773 Denis Diderot _An Essay on Blindness_ 50 (Eighteenth Century
Collections Online)  Idealism deserves very well to be reported to him;
and this hypothesis is as a double incentive for him, his singularity, and
much more the difficulty of refuting its principles, they being precisely
the same as those of Berkeley.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
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