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154 anthropocentrism of such a philosopher as Fichte was something very different from the anthropocentrism of the medieval and classical philosophers. I can but refer again to §.

Just as little as Lavrov, does Mihailovskii attain to psychological grasp of the difficulties which his predecessors Bakunin, Bělinskii, and others, had had in their dealings with the subjectivism of German idealism. For all his perspicacity and circumspection, Mihailovskii shows here his lack adequate insight in the psychological and the philosophico-historical fields. He has not grasped the epistemological significance of German idealism, despite his own excursion (immediately to be discussed) into the same domain of thought. Mihailovskii's defects arise out of his positivism.

IHAILOVSKII contemplates chiefly the modern age, the present day, having far less interest in the earlier periods of history. With Comte, he considers that the modern age is the historical transition to the desired social reconstruction.

Following Comte, he characterises the epoch of transition as anarchist, exaggeratedly individualistic, and sceptical. Like Comte (and like Louis Blanc and the French in general), he considers that the decomposition of the Catholic-feudal middle age begins with Protestantism, with Luther, and in philosophy with Descartes, whose "cogito ergo sum" gives expression to a one-sided and overstrained individualism. Descartes is already sceptical, but Montaigne is the true spokesman of the sceptical spirit. Then came the eighteenth century, with Voltaire, the encyclopedists, and the materialists, the age of rationalist enlightenment, whereby the old medieval philosophy and morality were definitively uprooted. The great revolution brought this negative and destructive epoch to a close, being itself the transition to a new organic epoch. In Mihailovskii's terminology the revolution constitutes the transition from the eccentric to the subjective anthropocentric modern age; the revolution is the beginning of the modern age. In connection with this philosophico-historical construction, I must refer to what has previously been said concerning his philosophy of history; the Comtist formula has replaced his own, for there is really no difference between