Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/428

402 power! The solipsist, if he be in earnest, cannot fail to be aware of his weakness, cannot fail to recognise the absurdity of his epistemological and metaphysical isolation.

For the ethical and social appraisement of subjectivism, of extremist subjectivism or solipsism, Stirner and his absolute egoism are still adduced by some as a model and by others as an awful example. Even if Stirner's identification of solipsism and egoism be regarded as sound, this does not provide an ethical criterion for the characterisation of subjectivism in all its form. The solipsist is not perforce an egoist and nothing more. Schopenhauer, for instance, despite his solipsism and nihilism, declares that sympathy is the foundation of all true morality. Nietzsche, in like manner, by no means rejected morality when he preached "the revaluation of values" and "beyond good and evil." But, in his view, sympathy degraded the superman to man.

Moreover, there is egoism and egoism; there are varying degrees and qualities of egoism. The egoist and egoistic subjectivist, unless he be an absolute solipsist (and in truth there can be no such being), may, for all his absolutism, egoism, and sense of the sovereignty of his own personality, nevertheless recognise that others have rights; he may become, let us say, a constitutionalist and even a parliamentarist.

Subjectivist German philosophy has in truth laid much stress on ethics. All subjectivists are incurable moralists and preachers of morality—witness Fichte, Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche. Here we have a fingerpost whose legend cannot be mistaken!

But if solipsism and solipsistic individualism be absurd, the extreme objectivism of Marx and Engels is no less absurd. There is simply no such thing as a mass consciousness or a class consciousness, no folk-spirit, no sensus communis, no general will, if the term consciousness is to be understood in a psychological sense; what exist are class views, mass views, or what we may term collective judgments and views generated by the mutual interactions of individuals.

I have previously pointed out (§ 44) that Fichte's "ego" is less alarming than it may seem. Nevertheless, it was against Fichte's solipsism that Schelling formulated his nature pantheism; in Hegel's hands this pantheism became historical, and in those of Marx it became social as well. But social pantheism is a psychological and logical absurdity. Society