but from the days of Kant onwards the influence was that of the new Europe![1]
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-
- ↑ In exemplification of the psychology of the sudden and unbridged revolution in thoughts and feelings, I may quote a writer who is quite unconcerned with philosophical problems, and merely records facts. I refer to Pantelěev, Siberian exile and progressive publisher, who has recently gained considerable reputation as a literator. In his Reminiscences, referring to the close of the fifties, he writes: "But now, one fine day, a veritable bomb was hurled at us, in the shape of a lithographed translation of Büchner's Force and Matter. We all read it with the utmost enthusiasm, and from every one of us, in a moment, it tore away the last shreds of traditional belief. . . . Notwithstanding the brilliant success of 'Sovremennik,' progressive socio-political ideas had secured comparatively few adherents even among young people; many had adopted them only to abandon them lightly, and even in our day such ideas had to struggle for existence; but the thoughts of Büchner and Feuerbach took the Russian mind by storm, and none of the severities of the subsequent reaction were able to restore to society the naive beliefs of the past."—I quote this passage because Pantelěev, who makes no pretensions to philosophic illumination, gives a frank and unadorned but perfectly accurate picture of the situation.
