Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/173

Rh with the ethical relationship of man to his fellows and to the universe.

We may think also of the three stages of Louis Blanc, which are likewise to some extent a reflex of Comte's ideas; the stage of authority (Catholicism), of individualism (Luther and Protestantism), and of harmony or association. Mihailovskii himself expounds Louis Blanc's philosophy of history, and does so to clarify his own ideas. He also reproduces Saint-Simon's scheme, in which Saint-Simon distinguished between the organic era and the critical; and he adduces Vico's three stages, the divine, the heroic, and the human. He compares all these schemata with Comte's stages and with his own.

Mihailovskii devotes much thought to the three stages of development. He moots the question why historians and philosophers of history commonly inclined to speak about three stages, and answers his own question by an analysis of the Hegelian dialectic evolutionary process, which likewise has three stages. He contends that the basis of this conception of three stages is to be found in the natural and obvious contemplation of the future as compared with the present and the past. Since the future is the natural continuation and development of the past, with the idea of the three historical stages there very readily becomes associated the concept of the Hegelian dialectic or that of Vico's "ricorsi," namely that the third stage redevelops itself into the first. But this redevelopment is not a reversion; it is a further evolution upon a higher level. Mihailovskii therefore distinguishes between the degree of development and the type. When Rousseau, for example, expresses his loathing for civilisation and his desire to return to primitive conditions, he is not longing for the savagery and lack of cultivation characteristic of primitive man, but aspires merely to restore primitive simplicity (the type, that is to say) in conjunction with the higher evolution.