Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/172

146 Louis Blanc, he shows that great men create, not out of themselves, but out of their environment, and that it is individual circumstances and the circumstances of the day which make these great men representatives and leaders. Precise psychological analysis enabled Mihailovskii to reduce to reasonable proportions exaggerations à la Carlyle (hero-worship), and to keep close to fact.

Mihailovskii's social psychology, precise and indefatigable, utterly excludes historical materialism. For Mihailovskii, as he himself said at times, the stomach question was also a soul question.

HE philosophy of history, as Mihailovskii maintains in opposition to the sceptics in his study of Louis Blanc, ought to expound the meaning of history. Mihailovskii takes this idea from Comte, the socialists, the evolutionary students of natural science, and above all from Darwin. In practical and political matters it is natural that Mihailovskii should think as a Russian concerning the meaning of historical development, his outlook being determined by that of his Russian predecessors and contemporaries.

He formulates a scheme of development in three stages, naming them, in conformity with Lavrov, the objective anthropocentric, the eccentric, and the subjective anthropocentric stage.

The objective anthropocentric stage is characterised by the naïve belief in accordance with which man holds himself to be the objective, absolute, and real centre of nature, determined from without. It is the stage of anthropomorphism and mysticism, the stage of theology and religion, the stage of objective teleology. The second or eccentric stage, pushing dualism of body and soul to an extreme, regards man as under the dominion of abstract ideas. The third or subjective anthropocentric stage is the genuinely human epoch, wherein man, his ethical ideals, a purely human teleology, are realised. It is, at the same time, the era of science and of positivism. Manifestly this scheme is referable to the three stages of Comte. We are contemplating the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive stage; but whereas Comte maintains as his principle of classification the theoretical relationship of man to the universe, Mihailovskii is increasingly concerned