Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/143

Rh activities, poems directed against Nicholas I and Alexander II, and on account of his personal relationships with Černyševskii and Mihailov. In 1867 he was interned at Vologda, where he wrote his Historical Letters. Lopatin, the translator of Marx, helped him to escape. Herzen had invited Lavrov to Paris, and he reached that city in March 1870, but before that date Herzen had died. Lavrov became a member of the International, and took part in the Commune, being sent to Belgium and to London to seek help for the Commune. In London he became acquainted with Marx and with other continental refugees, but had before this date become a convinced socialist. From 1873 to 1876, he was editor of the revolutionary periodical Vpered, with whose program we are already familiar. Not only did he become estranged from Bakunin and the Bakuninists, but in 1876 his own supporters turned against him. From 1376 to 1877, Vpered continued to appear under a different editorship. For six years thenceforward Lavrov remained outside the revolutionary organisation of the new Zemlja i Volja and of the Narodnaja Volja, and in 1879 he protested against the fighting methods of the latter body. After the assassination of Alexander II, Lavrov resumed a place in the ranks of the active revolutionaries, promoting the organisation of the Red Cross of the Narodnaja Volja, and being for this reason expelled from France for some time. In London he entered into relationships with the Narodnaja Volja, and became co-editor of its organ, Věstnik Narodnoi Voli (1883–1886). During this period Lavrov was chiefly engaged in the attack upon absolutism. During the nineties, Lavrov edited clandestine refugee literature, and wrote, Contributions to the History of the Russian Revolution. In addition, as in earlier years, he was continually occupied with his personal work in the theoretical field. He died in Paris in the year 1900. aware of the opposition between criticism and positivism, between subjectivism and objectivism, between Kant and Comte, but lacked power to transcend this opposition. His solution of the difficulty was to conceive the fundamental epistemological problems psychologically, somewhat after the manner which had been adopted by the most recent adherents of Hume, and after the manner which Spencer attempted for the apriori. Lavrov also speaks of the concept of duty quite in the Kantian style. He formulates his own categorical imperative, but this imperative (and it is here that he differs from Kant) is referred by him to psychical endowments which are to be admitted positivistically as extant facts.

Notable is the extent to which Lavrov was influenced by thinkers of the second and third rank. In the Historical Letters more space is allotted to the consideration of Proudhon, Buckle, Ruge, and Bruno Bauer, than to the consideration of Kant and Comte, although the book is essentially concerned with the ideas of the two last-named philosophers. Proudhon reproduced the ideas of Kant, Buckle, and Comte; but just as in Proudhon's writings Kantianism passes without transition into Hegelianism and into positivism, so in the