Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/199

Rh satisfaction, Faust was unhappy because he could discover no answer to his questions regarding the real being and essence of things. Faust failed to understand that there is no answer to such questions, that it is a false metaphysics which leads us to ask them, and that we must do away with them altogether. This false metaphysics must be replaced by positivism. The metaphysics is false because it has originated in a false relationship to the sciences, has originated in an aristocratic endeavour to answer ultimate questions without a positive study of the special sciences. It is the philosophy of capitalism, is constructed by the capitalist who is cut off from the tools that produce by direct labour. The Fausts seek happiness, but discover nothing beyond an unappeasable thirst for happiness, because their metaphysics is based upon the labour and hunger of millions, and because this leads them to set themselves tasks which transcend their own powers and transcend human faculty in general. Practical life, positive and unmetaphysical knowledge, oppose Faust and refute him.

Faustian metaphysics is not only theoretically false, but is likewise morally unsound, being an expression of the crass egoism which leads a man to isolate himself from the great majority of his fellows, although he wishes to exploit the labours of his fellow men for his own private purposes. "The metaphysician is a man who has been driven mad by fatness."

The Fausts, therefore, are just as unhappy as the speculator who is driven to suicide by a collapse on the stock exchange. Mihailovskii alludes more than once to the suicide of the unsuccessful commercial speculator, and there is an obvious connection in his mind between the word "speculation" in this sense and the speculation of the Fausts.

Mihailovskii concludes his sketchy analysis by saying that neither Hartmann with his philosophy of the unconscious, nor Pogodin with his orthodox slavophilism, could exorcise the spirit of suicide.

In a study of Garšin (1885) Mihailovskii analysed The Night. It is a minor point that Mihailovskii should have regarded the hero's death as a suicide, whereas Garšin merely made him die suddenly from the intensity of his newly awakened sentiment of love for his fellows. What interests us is Mihailovskii and his analysis of suicide. Like Faust, the egoist is recalled to childhood by the sound of the bell summoning