Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/236

210 of mythical thought. Kant reduced religion to morality. Comte began, like Hume, with the rejection of religion, but subsequently relapsed into fetichism.

To-day the religious problem may be formulated as follows. Can there be an unrevealed religion? Can the scientiﬁc or critical thinker, can the philosopher, have a religion; and if so, what religion?

HE eighteenth century is, in addition, the age of humanitarianism. This concept is conceived extensively and intensively. The brotherhood of the entire human race is to be realised through the inborn love of man for his fellows. To human love, Kant superadds the sense of human dignity.

In this respect, too, Kant and Hume are of historical importance. Hume called a halt to his scepticism when he came to consider ethics, whilst the critical philosophy of Kant culminated in a moral outlook on the world. For the very reason that they had uprooted theology, both these philosophers endeavoured to safeguard ethics, to establish morality upon a natural foundation.

This is why, in modern philosophy since Descartes, so much stress is laid upon the idea of naturalness. Men seek natural religion, natural law, natural morals, a state of nature, natural reason. Art, above all, strives to be natural. The enlightenment had led to the abandonment of the theological basis of thought and conduct. Enlightenment, humaneness and humanity, naturalness—these became synonyms.

During the nineteenth century, owing to the practical trend given to philosophy by Hume and Kant, rationalism, in so far as it was one-sidedly intellectual, was supplemented by emotionalism and voluntarism. These, in their turn, have been apt to receive a one-sided cultivation, commonly in opposition to intellectualism, as in the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

In my own formulation of the problem I contest the existence of a natural opposition between reason and emotion on the one hand and will on the other. My conception of the relationship between the three fundamental energies of the psyche differs both from that of the rationalists (or intellectualists) and from that of the voluntarists (and emotionalists). It is worth noting that in this psychological scheme Kant, the arch-rationalist, accepted feeling or emotion as a distinct