Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/278

252 unconditional surrender to theology. Nevertheless, the critic consciousness cannot find even in theology true repose and certainty; scepticism is not transcended. In Solov'ev's thought, Kant again and again comes into his own.

Kant and Kant's influence are already discernible in the fact that Solov'ev's real starting-point is from ethics, that Solov'ev seeks in ethics the foundation of the absolute as good. Practical philosophy is made the basis of theoretical, quite after the manner of Kant and his successors and in especial of Schopenhauer. At the close of The Critigue of Abstract Principles we read: "In God, truth is eternal, but in so far as God is not in us we do not live in the truth; not only is our knowledge fallacious, but our very being, our very reality is fallacious. Consequently for the true organisation of knowledge the organisation of reality is essential."

We recognise Kant in Solov'ev's mythology. Solov'ev's theosophical novel gives an ethical description of the cosmological process; the world-drama is the mythical objectivation of ethical human relationships; ethical problems are myth logically projected into the acons.

And what is Solov'ev's theoretical philosophy but the Kantian apriorism, expressed in a different terminology and provided with a different, a theological, content? Solov'ev's "mystical perception" is, in fact, modelled upon the "regulative ideas" of Kant. Just as for Kant these ideas were associated with rational or conceptual thought and with sensuous experience, so for Solov'ev is mystical apprehension associated with thought and experience or sensation. Solov'ev even uses unhesitatingly the Kantian terminology, speaking of "the forms of thought," of "concepts," and so on.

Conceptual thought and sensations, says Solov'ev, give to us objects merely as these are conceived and perceived by us. But we ascribe existence to such objects; we assume their effect upon us as manifested in our sensations to be immediately true; we create, in thought, relationships between one object and other objects; and we are convinced that the object exists independently of our thought and sensation. Here, too, Solov'ev employs Kantian terminology when he says that the object persists by itself; we have to do with the Kantian thing-by-itself. Even though Solov'ev differs from Kant in the psychological explanation of the way wherein the thing-by-itself enters into relation with our understanding, never-