Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/291

Rh They associate things and ideas which have no reasonable connection, for they discover secret similarities and identities. In this matter, the mystic resembles the scholastic, with his analogies, interpretations, indexes of truth, and so on. In the name "Roma," Solov'ev discovers the word amor, for it would appear that the Romans must have read from right to left after the Semitic fashion!

The attempt to find evidences for the influence upon this world of a higher invisible world, led him to regard as miracle the failure of the attempt on the tsar's life at Borki.

We have an index here, not merely of superstition, but of the conservative trend characteristic of mysticism. Mysticism is per se religious aristocracy, and aristocracy in general. The Mystic evades the petty details of work, in scientific matters, no less than in economic. He delights in the giddy theosophical constructions of a fantastic cosmogony; he has no taste either for stable and empirical conceptual thought or for technical economic labour. Contempt for this world is aristocratic, a manifestation of a conservative and reactionary aristocratic trend.

Solov'ev organised his free theocracy in a thoroughly aristocratic manner. Above all, the gift of prophecy was denied to the masses and to the democracy.

In political matters, too, Solov'ev was conservative. This is why his attention was riveted by the miracle of Borki, whereas he had no eye for thousands of similar miracles. This is why Emperor William II (dissent as he might from the latter's Philosophy of history) was for him the new Siegfried. This is why he admired Tsar Nicholas I, for to the tsar there had been granted a mysterious knowledge of higher Christian truth when in the name of Christianity he forbade Samarin to effect the forcible Russification of the Baltic provinces. In 1896, again, Solov'ev participated in the official jubilee, and shared in the joys, of his opponent Pobědonoscev.

The aristocratic trend of mysticism was likewise displayed in his preference for Catholicism, though the reasons for this preference were not clear to his own mind. Although he looked upon the church as the catholicity of the human race, it was the monarchical element in the papacy which allured him. Monotheism found its living symbol and likeness in monopapism, if I may coin the term.

It is true, however, that Solov'ev's aristocratic leanings