Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/500

474 very strongly that solipsism involved ethical and social isolation, and therefore rejected the doctrine. Bakunin was the first writer to proclaim that suicide was the logical outcome of this solipsistic isolation; Bělinskii and Herzen, taking a wider view, considered that solipsism culminated in crime and in murder, but these writers understood crime and murder to be manifestations of revolution, Herzen, too, coquetted with the Byronic view of these matters. Solov'ev accepted Dostoevskii's formula, in accordance with which murder and suicide issue from solipsism. Ropšin, too, agreed here with Dostoevskii. Mihailovskii associated the Faust problem with subjectivism, but considered that the decadent social order of capitalism was the nursery of Faust natures. From Plehanov and the Marxists we have a similar formulation of the problem, these writers passing to the other, the objectivist, extreme, and adopting solomnism.

A detailed consideration of the whole problem will find a more suitable place in the study of Dostoevskii, who devoted much attention to the matter. All that it is necessary to add here is that the Russians, while rejecting subjectivism, insist the more vigorously on the need for individualism. Individuality and its rights are defended against state and church, and in the sociological sphere the attempt is made to grasp the relationship of the individual to the nation. But the epistemological difficulties of the problem are not adequately faced (cf. ).

PISTEMOLOGICAL weakness is, as already indicated, especially noticeable in the ethical domain, in the treatment of the fundamental problems of ethics. Of peculiar importance is the problem, upon what foundation the moral imperative is to be based.

In this respect two tendencies are manifested in Russian thought. Solov'ev holds firmly to the Kantian ethic, believing that the moral problem has been solved once and for all by Kant and his categorical imperative. Lavrov is likewise influenced in ethical matters by Kant, but Lavrov does not ponder the epistemological side so deeply as does Solov'ev.

In ethics as well as in other departments of philosophy, most Russian thinkers have been consistent empiricists, and