Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/238

 These attempts developed, probably, under political and social conditions: the representatives of Russian culture manifested at times a "yearning" for religion; they were disposed, moreover, to invoke Justice when it was violated by government, and occasions for this were not wanting; and serfdom, which lasted till 1861 and produced at last a growing feeling of moral responsibility for such a state of things, incited them to take social facts into consideration.

This religious and moral tendency is fairly conspicuous, for instance, in the systems of the older Slavophiles, Kireyevsky, Homyakov and others, and even in the treatises of some "Westerners," for instance, Kavelin: he was particularly anxious to take account of moral feeling, but considered it in a psychological way, which aroused some criticism.

Modern Russian philosophers wanted to go further. Solovyev, for instance, firmly believed in God as an absolute principle of Truth, Good, and Beauty, Truth being the contents of His reason, Good the contents of His will. Beauty the contents of His feeling. According to this doctrine, this unified Whole determines the unity of the human mind, which is conscious of its connection with it. Integral knowledge includes, moreover, faith and various other elements of consciousness: it ascends from feeling to thought and from thought to mystical love which leads us to the cognition of the transcendent World. Besides this knowledge and the will to acquire it, the Idea of Good is the principle to which our will tends and on which depend our aims and actions: our life can have a meaning and become worthy of our moral nature only