Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/200

174 to early mass; he feels what pure love and pure sentiment might be; he would like to tear the pot-bellied idol out of his heart; but he does not know where to turn and how to take up the burden of his fellow men's misery. The new feeling is fugitive, and the egoist puts an end to his life with a pistol shot.

Mihailovskii considers that Bourget's book Le disciple contains an accurate analysis of the modern incapacity for living. The modern man is riven in twain, his thought is estranged from life, his thirst for analysis undermines the energy of will, he is afraid to act, and he succumbs to this disease of the will.

In his explanation of consciousness as an aggregate of multiple consciousnesses, Mihailovskii extols the centralism and despotism of the central consciousness, which finds expression in the will. This, he says, is health, but the loss of such a healthy despotism leads to a weakening and destruction of consciousness and of life in general. It is obvious that the explanation is purely verbal, that no real explanation is given why consciousness and will become enfeebled, seeing that we are not told for what reason the beneficent activity and energy of the healthy centralising despotism disappear, because we do not learn under what conditions they disappear.

ARX had represented Goethe's Faust as a capitalist. Mihailovskii followed up the idea, for the Faust problem attracted him and busied him from early days. In one of his first studies, that of Voltaire as Man and Thinker (1870), Mihailovskii discussed the question at some length.

Faust could not become happy because he had set himself an impossible aim and had chosen improper means for its realisation. Faust made a sharp distinction between the physical and the mental, and this was why, as Goethe aptly shows, he desired to solve his metaphysical problems with the aid of magic. But merely to formulate these problems is to enter the wrong path. In order to illustrate the morbidity characteristic of these Fausts with divided minds, Mihailovskii quotes from Brierre de Boismont's Du suicide et de la folie suicide similar speculations by a suicide.

Voltaire's good, learned, and wealthy Brahman was no