but in the very last moment the last criminal would have been executed in the name and in honour of absolute justice. In the main square of the abandoned and ruined city, we should see the crumbling scaffold on which is the skeleton of the last criminal; perched on the skull is a raven; fiat justitia, pereat mundus.
Despite this rejection of rigorism and its metaphysical foundation (the term metaphysical is used in the Comtist sense), Mihailovskii laid stress upon the necessity for recognising the extant contrast between good and evil, which he tended to conceive as a continuation of the ancient Iranian and Indian dualism. Truth has withdrawn to heaven, and the task of the ethical volunteer corps is to bring it back to earth. For the positivist, truth is merely relative, not absolute; but in practice, says Mihailovskii, it is after all absolute for man, since man cannot transcend it.
Mihailovskii was a Comtist, but he apprehended positivism as it was originally conceived by Hume and emended by Mill, for both the English philosophers regarded ethics as an integral portion of philosophy. Spencer, too, showed Mihailovskii the right path in these matters.
Mihailovskii was much influenced by the socialists as well by Comte. Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Marx, must in especial be recognised as his teachers. Proudhon was commended to him by the authority of Herzen, and exercised a great effect upon his mind in carlier years. In 1867 he translated Proudhon's De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, and he learned from its author to prize individuality. He was attracted by Louis Blanc's philosophy of history, was delighted by the principle of the organisation of labour, and vas an enthusiast on behalf of social workshops; he is said to have spent inherited property upon founding of a bookbinders' workshop. Marx's writings, and in especial the first volume of Capital, drew Mihailovskii's attention to the dangers of the division of labour and to the anarchy of the capitalist economic order.
From 1877 onwards, Mihailovskii was interested in the work of Dühring, the opponent of Marx and Engels, and was interested also in that of F. A. Lange, recommending both Dühring and Lange to the Russian youth. It need hardly be said that Mihailovskii's thought, like that of his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, was akin to Feuerbach's.
