Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/230

 Homyakov and others insisted on the "wholeness" of consciousness, implying faith and reason, reason and feeling (with volition). Some of the "Westerners" made similar attempts, but in another spirit; in a work dedicated to Granovsky, Kavelin endeavoured, for instance, to reconcile idealism with realism from a somewhat psychological point of view.

A different conception was formed by the "materialists " of the sixties, Pisarev, Antonovitch and others: they also deliberated, in a materialistic sense, on the "unity of the physical and moral Kosmos."

In modern times this has been done not only in a monistic, but, later on, in a critical spirit.

Modern Russian monistic systems had also a spiritualistic or a materialistic character; they can be noted here only in their general aspect.

Spiritualistic monism was very clearly formulated, in the main from a religious point of view, by one of its most convinced partisans. V. Solovyev criticised in this spirit the onesidedness of Comte's conception of the three stages of evolution; the Russian writer could not agree with a theory, which excluded theology and metaphysics from a general conception of the world and restricted itself to positive science; he formulated the postulates of his own system as follows: the "creative principles which are needed for the transformation of general facts or laws into a harmonious scientific edifice, cannot be deduced from these materials, just as the plan of a building cannot be deduced from the bricks employed to construct it"; these "creative principles" must be found by means of a higher kind of knowledge—the knowledge of absolute