Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/202

176 perfection in human affairs is integrality, a harmony of functions in man, and harmony of means in man's activities. By an integral human being, happiness for himself and his associates can only be found in activity on behalf of himself and his associates. Wagner can discover truth as well as another; to stitch shoes and to drain marshes are useful actions. The man of science may strive with nature, and he may do this theoretically (not practically like Faust); but what he must shun is the method adopted by Faust or by Wagner. Faust desires to work magic, and thereby becomes non-human. Wagner, too, is non-human, for everything human is alien to him; he is the piston of a pump, a pumping machine; not a whole but a mere part; not an individual (integral or undivided) but a mere instrument for the acquisition of facts.

With Comte, Mihailovskii appeals against Faust and the Brahman to the consideration that in true humanity theory and practice exist in mutual equipose. If we can give Faust and the Brahman fuller scope for their activities, if we can give them the opportunity and the power of sympathising practically with others' lives, if we can awaken in them the altruism of Comte, the tuism of Feuerbach, the sympathy of Adam Smith, they will become healthy, they will be concerned about very different problems, and this concern will lead them to victory, not defeat.

Faust and Wagner, the Brahman and the old woman, live close beside one another, but they do not know one another, and scarcely notice one another. They are complementary opposites, the obverse and the reverse of the same "eccentric" medal.

The use of the word eccentric shows us what was Mihailovskii's historico-philosophical explanation of the Faust problem.

It is the division of labour into the economic and mental spheres which has made men non-human. Philosophically it is metaphysics which causes the disintegration of the stage of eccentricity. It is thus in Saint-Simon's sense that Mihailovskii appraises the eighteenth-century enlightenment which found expression above all in Voltaire, by saying that an organic epoch is succeeded by a critical epoch. In the story of the Brahman and the old woman his neighbour, Voltaire displayed the opposition between knowledge and happi-