Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/498

472 Platonism. Plato was the first philosopher to declare that myth has a place in philosophy; Hume's scepticism and Kant's criticism were launched against myth and mysticism.

Their church made Platonists of the Russians; Greco-Russian Orthodoxy cherished the Platonic mythos; the slavophils turned naturally to Joannes Damascenus and to Plato. In this matter Solov'ev followed the slavophils and his church, but Solov'ev had understood Kant, hence his inward conflict representing the opposition between Kant and Plato. Kant inclined rather to the school of Aristotle, whose logic was abhorred by the slavophils. Kant opposed the blind acceptance whether of empiricism or of rationalism, but the Russians failed to grasp this, and hence their unorganised vacillation between Platonism and nihilism. Solov'ev turned from Kant to Plato; the empiricists, turning their backs on Plato, lapsed into uncritical positivism and materialism.

ANT'S criticism as epistemological reflection concerning the range and limits of cognition, was rejected by Russian thinkers, who regarded it as a form of subjectivism. Kant's epistemological activism, his explanation of the process of cognition as an active procedure on the part of the understanding and as an auto-procreation of concepts (§ 44), was not comprehensible to the positivist Russians. The teaching of his church has accustomed the Russian to accept a ready-made and objectively given revelation; and in epistemology, therefore, he remains an extreme objectivist long after he has ceased to accept the data of revelation. The Russian nihilists and empiricists, the Russian materialists and positivists, remain epistemological objectivists. In like manner they remain objectivists vis-à-vis the chosen European authorities—for they are habituated to objective authority.

The Russians classed Kant with Fichte and Stirner. Subjectivism, conceived by them in its extremest manifestation, was resisted by them as solipsism; Bělinskii fought Stirner just as he fought Homjakov; Solov'ev discerned subjectivism, not only in rationalism, but also in sensualism, and in his dread of subjectivism sought refuge in myth and mysticism. Everywhere we find the same lack of criticism,