Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/380

354 In his philosophical opus magnum, The Monistic View of History, Plehanov discusses the ethical problem, although the work is properly concerned solely with the question of freedom and necessity. How, asks Plehanov, can the consciousness, how can voluntary decisions, how can motivation, be explained in a purely objectivist manner? How can voluntary decisions, above all, be even partially conceived as a mere "reflex" of the object? With this question, the objectivism of Marx and Engels is shivered to fragments, and despite all his Marxist orthodoxy, Plehanov takes refuge in Spinoza.

HEN we talk of "from Marxism to idealism," we have to understand by idealism, religion as the definite opposite of materialism. In Russia, materialism signifies, irreligion or antireligion, and in the narrower sense, atheism.

The return to religion effected by the revisionists was partly determined by the example of the German revisionists. For the most part, however, the Russian revisionists followed the current represented by Solov'ev and Dostoevskii. To-day, as I have said, it is no longer possible to speak of Struve, Bulgakov, and similar writers, as revisionists. But there do exist