Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/146

120 they are "closely connected," and he explains that history is the science of non-recurrent phenomena, whereas sociology is the history of recurrent phenomena. Are we to interpret this as meaning much what recent philosophers of history (for example Windelband and Rickert) mean when they talk of the individual in the historical process? In one who wrote after Comte, and after the Spencerian criticism of Comte's hierarchy of the sciences, this lack of precision is a serious matter, even apart from the consideration that, as previously pointed out, Lavrov failed to distinguish clearly between the ideas of Comte and those of Kant.

For Comte, in his classification and hierarchy of the sciences, applied his positivism, which he believed to be perfectly objectivist. Psychology, based upon the conceptions of consciousness, disappeared from the field, because consciousness, individual consciousness, disappeared before the historical process of humanity at large; psychology was degraded to become a mere department of biology, sociology being constituted as the true mental science, and being conceived also as the psychology of humanity and of human history. Spencer, on the other hand, rightly rejected the Comtist hierarchy of the sciences, for he found it impossible to dispose of the facts of "subjective" psychology in the unpositive and autocratic manner adopted by Comte. Spencer insisted upon the rights of logic and above all upon those of ethics, and on these lines constructed his epistemologically modified classification of the sciences. Spencer had recognised how naïve was Comte in epistemological matters; he had grasped the fundamental significance of consciousness and therefore of psychology; and in like manner he had recognised the importance of ethics beside and above sociology. Spencer paid due epistemological regard to the rights of subjectivism, whereas Comte, in his later phase, which was contrasted with his objectivist positivism, was forced uncritically into subjectivism. Spencer, too, believed that his evolutionism sufficed to explain Kant, alike epistemologically and ethically.

By the study of Kant, Comte, and Spencer, Lavrov was led to the same problems as Spencer, but Lavrov lacked the philosophic strength which would have enabled him to establish his doctrines upon sound epistemological foundations, to render his standpoint philosophically secure. Lavrov's classi-