Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/239

213 After Fichte, Schelling turned away from Fichte and Kant, and turned back to nature and history. Hegel escaped solipsism by pantheism; Stimer, Hegel's pupil, was the ﬁrst to conceive solipsism as egoism; whilst Schopenhauer transformed subjectivism into his voluntarist nihilism.

We shall see how the question of subjectivism and objectivism, and in particular the problem of solipsism, caused a great commotion in Russian thought. Nor is this surprising, for consistent subjectivism, the solipsistic autoapotheosis to which Fichte and Schelling were prone, is brutal and positively absurd. From the critical outlook, Stirner's egoism is nothing more than a bogey to terrify the philistines—and a not particularly terrifying bogey after all. From Hegel, Feuerbach advanced objectivistically towards socialism, desiring to reconcile the ego with the tu. Marx, on the other hand, conceiving historical objectivism in an absolute sense, went so far as positive elimination of the ego and his individual consciousness, extreme subjectivism thus evoking extreme objectivism.

N conclusion, then, what has been said about modern philosophy may be summarised in three antitheses. Philosophy is absolutely opposed to theology, anthropism to theism; but this must not be taken to imply that theism is utterly false, or that anthropism is atheistic, for all that is meant is that the anthropistic outlook and point of departure has come into its own in modern philosophy. At the same time, in the political sphere, democracy is counterposed to theocracy, to theocratic aristocracy, this signifying that democracy, likewise, possesses theoretic and philosophical importance. In ultimate analysis, modern philosophy has ceased to be the queen of the sciences. It does not occupy a higher plane than the special sciences, but ranks beside them. It is scientia generalis.

USSIAN philosophy of history, sociological analysis of the motive forces of evolution, and the attempt to grasp the laws that regulate the temporal succession of social phenomena,