Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/164

138 that the nature of things is uncognisable, incomprehensible. But the thesis is not precisely formulated in detail; the proposition is reiterated in the terminology of Hume and Comte and sometimes also in that of Kant; on the whole it is Spencer's agnosticism to which Mihailovskii adheres. Quite in the sense of Comte, he insists upon the idea of the relativity of knowledge. Man cannot get beyond his five senses; there are no absolute truths, but only relative truths, things that are true for men.

It is plain that Mihailovskii's theory of cognition remains purely positivist. Like his contemporaries, above all like Lavrov, he rejected the Kantian idealism, in so far as this was criticism, in a most uncritical manner; and he reduced the apriori to physiological differences of organisation.

Nevertheless Mihailovskii was not a naturalist, not a materialist like the radical realists; to him psychical phenomena were no less real than physical. Mihailovskii was here in agreement with Lavrov and with the emphasis the latter laid upon consciousness.

From Comte and Spencer, Mihailovskii passed to Darwin. Having been trained in the natural sciences, he retained interest in these branches of knowledge. Darwinism gave him an opportunity to clear up his ideas upon the important question of the social struggle, and evolutionism confirmed for him the positivist doctrine of progress; but, as we shall shortly see, he made a profound, a positively dualistic distinction, between progress and evolution, and he rejected Darwinism.

In ethics, Mihailovskii was a utilitarian, and he took occasion from time to time to defend this standpoint, all the more since utilitarianisin was condemned in official literature. For example, he championed utilitarianism against the theologian Malcev, a Russian writer whose name is not unknown in German theological literature. For Mihailovskii, utilitarianism was the ethic based on experience. Precisely because based on experience was it preferable to intuitive morality, erroneously preferred as more ideal. Mihailovskii differed from Lavrov concerning Kant, and Kant's conception of duty, which Mihailovskii could not accept. Were he a painter, said Mihailovskii, he would represent the history of mankind in three pictures. The second of these would be named "The Last Criminal." It would show society perishing,