Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/231

 principles and causes, expounded in theology and metaphysics; and only in this connection of theology and metaphysics with positive science, can this whole obtain a decisive influence on Life. This epistemological theory implied corresponding views of the Universe. Solovyev worshipped the Spirit of God in the Universe; he perceived a general and positive unity in the entity of the World and in the creative power and the evolutionary process comprising its phenomena—nature and man; from this transcendant point of view Solovyev affirmed that the World must be united with God through the medium of man, and "transposed" the centre of man's existence into a supernatural and superpersonal sphere which reveals its creative power in the collective mind of humanity and contains the leading principles of human life: "in union with God" man has to realize Truth, Good and Beauty in the World, and in fulfilling this mission he contributes to progress. Similar conceptions were enunciated by Trubetskoi and other writers.

Materialistic monism was an offshoot of "Marxism." One of its most rigid partisans, Plechanov, has expressed it in the following well-known formula: "matter thinks," and has deduced from it a materialistic conception of the world and of social life: "as soon as you have admitted," he wrote some years ago, "that the relations of production, on which men enter independently of their will, are reflected in their heads in the form of different economic categories, in the form of