Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/174

148 The idea of Vico's recurrences (ricorsi) is reduced by Mihailovskii to the simple conviction that the social principles given to man by nature necessarily enter into strife one with another (as we see, in the modern age, in the struggle between authority and criticism), and that ultimately one of these principles secures general validity as the principle of authority has done in science, and so on.

Mihailovskii likewise applies his three stages in the domain of economics. Society is for him the organisation of labour, society is a working and co-operating society.

In the first stage, according to Mihailovskii, simple co-operation is dominant, a number of individuals working side by side and together for the same practical end. From the very first these individuals are differently endowed and differ in the extent of their training; but even at this stage there are manifest the first and still inconspicuous consequences of co-operation, in the form of the division of labour. Division of labour, however, does not become well marked until the second stage. This "eccentric" stage is not characterised by any aim tending to unite men, by any human aim; theory and practice are severed; the division of labour is perfected; the individual becomes one-sided and a mere organ of society; man ceases to be a complete man, and therefore ceases to be man. Not until the coming of the third stage, the subjective anthropocentric stage, does man return to the type of simple cooperation, but does so upon a higher plane of evolution. "Man for mankind, everything for mankind," becomes the saving password.

In the domain of knowledge, the fully developed human being is presented to us as "the profane one." He is the positivist philosopher who has renounced metaphysics and theology, and who endeavours to cognise those things only which are within his mental grasp. He is the positively trained man of culture in contradistinction to men of professional dexterity and the one-sided specialists of earlier days.

IHAILOVSKII was compelled to consider Darwin's theory of evolution, for this theory was interwoven with the leading social and political problems, not only by Marx and Engels, but also by the Darwinists and their