Caird Edward (1835–1908), Scottish philosopher, a leading absolute idealist. Influential as both a writer and a teacher, Caird was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and master of Balliol College, Oxford. His aim in philosophy was to overcome intellectual oppositions. In his main work, The Critical Philosophy of Kant (1889), he argued that Kant had done this by using reason to synthesize rationalism and empiricism while reconciling science and religion. In Caird’s view, Kant unfortunately treated reason as subjective, thereby retaining an opposition between self and world. Loosely following Hegel, Caird claimed that objective reason, or the Absolute, was a larger whole in which both self and world were fragments. In his Evolution of Religion (1893) Caird argued that religion progressively understands God as the Absolute and hence as what reconciles self and world. This allowed him to defend Christianity as the highest evolutionary stage of religion without defending the literal truth of Scripture. See also IDEALISM, PHILOS- OPHY OF RELIGIO. J.W.A.