Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/207

 ethnographical museums of Petrograd; and the late Professor Haruzin summed up the results of this work in his lectures on ethnography.

Sociological studies appeared somewhat later. They were inaugurated in the sixties by Lavrov, a writer who, at the beginning of his career, was considerably influenced by Hegel. Lavrov introduced the "subjective method" in sociology: he arrived at the conclusion that social facts cannot be merely counted but must be weighed also. This point of view was developed by Mihailovsky, Karyeev, Tuzhakov and others; they maintained, that the conception of human personality cannot be exclusively theoretical: it must be at the same time moral and therefore not only explained, but estimated; and social facts, being a product of the reciprocal relations of such personalities and acting on them, must be appreciated. Later sociological studies fell, however, under French and English influences—and chiefly that of Comte's positivism and Spencer's evolutionism. The positive philosophy of Comte became popular in Russia in the second half of the sixties, and Lavrov took an interest in it. Comte's sociology was also appreciated by Mihailovsky and De Roberty; Kovalevsky studied it when he was still a student at Harkov and applied some of its principles as well as those of Spencer's "genetic sociology" in his subsequent works on this subject; he tried to combine sociology with the comparative and historical study of institutions and their evolution. Besides many admirers, Spencer's sociological theory