Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/512

486 but from the days of Kant onwards the influence was that of the new Europe!

Every struggle demands its victims, even the struggle of philosophy against theology and theoctacy. And the struggle we are now considering is characterised by the indecision which invariably ensues upon the direct contact between an old and a new civilisation. A general process of decomposition sets in, accompanied by abnormal and positively pathological manifestations.

In many instances, radical negation remains mere scepticism. The sceptic lapses into a mood of habitual criticism, but this criticism is itself uncritical, the inner void is again and again filled by the newest ideas and "idealets," but these are again and again discarded. The scepticism ends in a numbing instability, uncertainty, and vagueness. The will becomes enfeebled as well as the reason. The resulting condition is that which Mihailovskii has so thoroughly analysed (and condemned) as the modern Faust-malady. Ropšin shows us that the disease has invaded the camp of the revolutionaries, who prior to this have always preserved faith in the revolution.

Philosophy and theology fight the great fight concerning God. The struggle rages round the question of the revealed God, the main problem being that of revelation and tradition versus experience and science. Russian thinkers have from the religious and moral aspect attempted to sum up this problem as culminating in the weighty and oppressive alternatives of murder or suicide. Acceptance of modern German philo-