Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/206

180 and the old morality could exist only in a decaying, degenerating, and corrupt society. But this immorality is one of the hammers of history; a great amputation is imminent. The eighteenth century enlightenment and the diffusion of wealth have freed the lords of the theatre from their fears, and they now plunge into enjoyment.

Notwithstanding his onslaughts on the dominant morality, Mihailovskii did not become a disciple of the Russian preachers Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. They too, were absolutists who represented their own opinions and feelings as universally valid rules of ethics. In the case of both these moralists Mihailovskii censured the exaggerated personal striving towards self-perfectionment, which led Tolstoi to a Buddhistic quietism, and Dostoevskii to the voluptuousness of martyrdom. Man has not simply to consider his personal responsibility. Not conscience alone is decisive, but also the sense of honour, and it is the two in conjunction which lead the rightly balanced human being to play his part in the social order.

Mihailovskii opposed the representatives of the latest Russian philosophical idealism, which was on such excellent terms with bourgeois politico-social materialism. In the days of the great revolution; the bourgeois had been the idealists, whilst- the philosophers of that day had taught anthropological and cosmopolitan realism. The philosophical idealists were like Voltaire, who thought that a belief in God was a good thing for his tailor.

Mihailovskii was especially opposed to those later disciples of Marx who abjured historical materialism to champion mysticism and ecstasy. Whilst Mihailovskii had at first attacked the Marxists on account of their historical materialism, he turned later against the materialists who had been converted to idealism.

Mihailovskii draws a sharp distinction between religion and mysticism, considering them to be fundamental opposites. Mysticism translates man from natural reality into a cloudy indefinite remoteness, into regions where the fantastic gods of the mythologies play their senseless parts; religion, on the other hand, connects man with the realities of life, and makes him responsible for his actions. Belief and knowledge may be dead, may be incapable of leading to action. Religion is the harmony of belief and knowledge with man's ethical ideals, and is the impulse to action in a definite direction.