Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/148

122 reformation broke the power of the church and its doctrines; the absolute state came into existence, but will yield place to the new socialistic ordering of society.

Whereas Comte regarded social evolution and its stages as proceeding in accordance with a historically given regime of law, Lavrov refuses to accept this reign of law as a mere empirical datum, but desires to understand it and establish it rationalistically. Comte had indeed explained his law of the three stages psychologically, with reference to the analogy of individual development. But in his Philosophie Positive, Comte failed to demonstrate the individual obligation to accept his positivism; he did not show why everyone of us ought to cooperate actively in tie spread and practical development of the positive, antitheological, and antimetaphysical outlook on the universe.

Lavrov was aware of the weakness of positivism in this respect, and he therefore endeavoured to introduce the idea of moral obligation into the historical process without the epistemological dualism which severs Comte's Politique positive from his Philosophie positive. To Lavrov, universal history was per se a world assize; he regarded evolution as the development of moral aspirations; for him, the historic description of individual historic epochs was an illustration of ethical principles.

To Lavrov, history was a developmental process subject to definite and necessary laws. Man, himself, was likewise subordinated to these laws, but was at the same time empowered with full awareness of the situation, to adapt himself to the historical process, freely deciding to strive for attainable goals. Lavrov terms the primary social state "culture," this being the stage which Hegel described as the unfree and the unconscious. But, according to Lavrov we have to understand by "civilisation," history as it is deliberately made by men with awakened consciousness, the purposive elaboration of inherited "culture."

The Kantian postulate of freedom is transformed by Lavrov into the illusion of freedom. The conscious individual (and when Lavrov speaks of consciousness he is thinking not only of the psychological but also of the critical and ethical consciousness) chooses aims for himself and appraises these aims ethically. But whereas Kant had endeavoured establish ethical purposiveness upon his apriori, Lavrov