Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/239

 when it is a "justification of Good"; it proceeds from a kind of moral unity, able to govern individual and social life. Our consciousness approves these two wills, directed to "True Good," and thus establishes the union of Truth and Good. Truth and Good, however, cannot realize these ideal contents in sensual forms: this incarnation is reserved to Art and intimately connected with artistic feeling. From this preeminently religious point of view Solovyev considered, then, the problem of unity of consciousness, the correlation of reason, will, and feeling. Prince Trubetskoi held nearly the same religious opinions, but formulated his theory from a somewhat different metaphysical and epistemological point of view: in the Absolute he perceived the condition of our knowledge. He maintained that the Absolute cannot be limited by its essence and manifests it in everlasting free activity; the Absolute thus produces its "other self" and communicates with it; and we freely go to meet this revelation in every act of our knowledge. Hence in its intimate nature existence, known by our spiritual being, must also be spiritual; it conditions all our knowledge and can be an object of "faith," that is, of immediate impression (intuition), of reality and of volition, and not only an object of rational and empirical knowledge. Thus Trubetskoi acknowledged a unifying spiritual principle of the universe, in relation to which the phenomenal world must be considered, a concrete "subject of this universal object," which reveals itself in its creative reason and will, in its altruistic existence for others,