Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/272

246 reason; from logic, syllogistics, dialectics, we must return to mystical contemplation. The critical understanding has isolated the individual psychical faculties, has attempted to make them independent one of another, has led to an inner division in the human spirit. Rescue from this state can be secured in one way only, by a return to faith, to contemplation to intuition, in a word to that reason wherein all the spiritual energies, acting as a perfect unity, constitute a living whole. This unity of the spirit was, he says, most perfectly attained among the Greek fathers of the church; but Kirěevskii recognises that it has become impossible for mankind to regain their standpoint. Philosophy is at once the outcome and the foundation of the sciences and the leader in the path we have to take between the sciences and faith. The new knowledge demands a new philosophy. Hence Kirěevskii based himself upon Schelling, who after his return to mysticism could lead the new knowledge and the new civilisation back to the true faith. At any rate, the saving Russian philosophy could be established upon the foundation of Schelling's teachings; the Greek fathers would serve this philosophy as signposts, would offer it the principles requisite for the guidance of life.

It is manifest that Kirěevskii is endeavouring with the aid of Schelling, and especially with the aid of Schelling in his later developments, Schelling entangled in theosophy and mythology, to confute Kant and Hegel. To put the matter in psychological and epistemological terms, Kirěevskii accepts the datum of Kantian criticism that the highest religious truths are not cognisable by the understanding. With the establishment of this proposition Kant deprived European rationalist civilisation of its roots, but he failed to take the further step that was necessary. Schelling was the first to turn away from rationalism to intuition, to intellectual contemplation. And yet Kant desired by means of his criticism to find a way back to faith. "Consequently the leading characteristic of believing thought is found in the endeavour to fuse all the individual parts of the soul into a single energy, to discover that inner concentration of being wherein the reason, the will, and the emotions, but also the conscience, the beautiful, the true, the wonderful, the object of desire justice, compassion, the totality of reason, flow together to form a living whole, so that the essence of personality becomes re-established in its primitive indivisibility." To Kirěevskii