Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/378

352 objectivist. The individual and the individual consciousness are wholly absorbed in the mass; the individual consciousness must yield place before the mass consciousness. Russian orthodox Marxists take the same standpoint, and therefore attack the subjectivism of Mihailovskii and Lavrov and these authors' endorsement of ethics and ethical aims. Objectivist Marxism is objectively historical and amoralist.

Russian revisionism was inaugurated by Struve, who declared himself in favour, not only of ethical but also of metaphysical individualism. Struve defended the individual consciousness and the idea of substance, giving a more than Kantian prominence to soul-substance and the freedom of the will.

From positivism and materialism Struve made an abrupt return to metaphysics. The acceptance of metaphysics implied the acceptance of religion and mysticism. Before long it was hardly possible to speak of the movement as one of Marxist revisionism; the revisionists had simply become "idealists," the name used by friend and foe alike to denote those who tend towards the opposite pole from materialism and positivism ("from materialism to socialism," Bulgakov).

For Russians the watchword, Return to Kant, embodies a comparatively vague philosophical program, for there has hitherto been little accurate study in Russia of the Kantian philosophy. In the present volumes it has been possible to refer to Solov'ev alone as possessing a knowledge of Kant. For the Russian revisionists (and indeed for the German revisionists) the name of Kant is little more than a catchword. The reference is really to neokantianism or, to speak yet more strictly, to the various German philosophers of the present day whose thought is related to that of Kant. F. A. Lange, Schuppe, Riehl, Cohen, Windelband, Rickert, Stammler, and others, have been the teachers of the Russian revisionists.

Properly speaking, therefore, Russian revisionism falls back upon Mihailovskii. The revisionists accept Mihailovskii's subjective method. The orthodox Marxists regard this as a reversion to the narodničestvo, or at any rate Plehanov identifies subjectivism with the narodničestvo. But as far as metaphysics and the philosophy of religion are concerned, the revisionists find Mihailovskii inadequate, and therefore these sometime Marxists have returned to Solov'ev and Dostoevskii.

So general has been this turning away from Marxism as