Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/294

268 power of others. He is proud of his freedom, but is the slave of chance and of outward happenings.

The man must undergo conversion if he is to be saved from this logical sequence of his atheism, and the first step upon the way to salvation is that he should recognise his weakness and lack of freedom. But Solov'ev warns us that while one who takes no more than this first step will cease to be a potential murderer, he will nevertheless, if he goes no further, remain a potential suicide.

Suicide, the application of destructive force to oneself, is a loftier and freer deed than murder. The judge and the condemned are one and the same; but the judgment is false, for the decision to commit suicide involves a contradiction (this is an echo of Schopenhauer). The man recognises his weakness and lack of freedom, and yet the act of suicide manifests the possession of a certain degree of strength and freedom. Why, then, did he not turn this strength and freedom to account on behalf of life?

The suicide rightly recognises in himself the existence of human incapacity, but he draws a false conclusion when he makes this incapacity a universal law, for now he does not merely feel the evil but believes in evil. "Everyone who recognises the universality of human evil, but fails to believe in superhuman goodness, is driven to suicide." Now, superhuman goodness is God.

Thus suicide is the necessary consequence of atheism. Belief in God restores to men belief in man. But the man who is left entirely to himself, and who attempts to dispense with God, becomes a murderer or a suicide. The last deed of the godless man is murder or suicide. Unmeaning concentration upon oneself, disastrous isolation, results in murder or suicide. He only who unites himself in Christ with God and in the church with the world will avoid transferring his own wickedness into nature; all that he will take from nature will be death.

Dostoevskii bases the thesis in a somewhat different manner, and we shall have to discuss the problem in fuller detail when we come to consider the ideas of that writer. [sic] Here it suffices to say that Solov'ev, like Dostoevskii, identifies the revolution with murder, but that Solov'ev fails to discuss the matter adequately. He indicates that there is a connection between the problem of suicide and murder, and the general question