Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/232

 prices, money, capital and so on, you must acknowledge that on a certain economic basis there must grow a corresponding ideological superstructure ." One of the adherents of this doctrine, Iljin (Lenin), stood forth recently in its defence against those "Marxists" who try to combine empirical criticism with Marxism.

These dogmatical constructions could not satisfy the critical spirit of those, who were conscious of the epistemological problems implied in them: the doctrine of Kant could not establish itself before the sixties, or even later, and only towards the end of the century, after Vvedensky began to lecture at the University of Petrograd, the critical philosophy was accepted by some Russian thinkers. From that time, however, Kantian doctrine was supplemented by neo-Kantian interpretations, and some modern Russian philosophers began to deliberate on the problem of the unity of knowledge, which underlies the unitarian conception of the World. Karinsky, well known as a critic of Kant, adhered, however, to Kant's views on self-consciousness and its unity and identity, without which knowledge is not possible, and criticised only his theory concerning the rôle which self-consciousness is playing, according to its own principles, in the construction of the external world.

Meanwhile science and learning tried, in their turn, to solve this problem, at least in some of their domains, and Russian scientific and learned men contributed to this movement.