(by Bachofen and others), and in works on the law of population, but did not upon these subjects utter definitive views of his own. As in so many other questions, it sufficed him to gain a general scientific outlook.
Were we to enter into a fuller criticism of his views, we should have to ask whether Mihailovskii had rightly understood the evolution of the division of labour and the significance of that process, and we should have to enquire whether the abolition of the division of labour has the fundamental importance that Mihailovskii ascribes to it. Marx looked forward to such an abolition in the society of the future, but to him the matter was of no more than secondary importance. Closer study of the subject is requisite. With Bücher and others we may distinguish between several kinds of division of labour; we must clearly recognise that the injurious effects of division of labour are largely dependent upon the undue length of the working day, and so on.
No more than a passing reference can be made to all these questions, for I desire to do no more than indicate the leading defects of Mihailovskii's periodic subdivision of the stages of evolution. His distinction of the three stages as objective anthropocentric, eccentric, and subjective anthropocentric, was a failure.
In early days man was objectivist, for he did not, like Descartes, deliberately make his own consciousness the starting point of his theory and practice; man had a naïve belief in the outer world, wherein his thoughts and feelings were wholly immersed. Nevertheless, and indeed for this very reason, he was a (naïve) anthropomorphist and mythologer, as we learned in § 41a. The middle ages had not become "eccentric"; what Mihailovskii talks of as eccentric is nothing more than the objective anthropomorphic stage; there is no distinction here between the middle ages and the earlier epoch. Besides, the dualism of body and soul is by no means characteristic of the middle ages.
Equally unsatisfactory is Mihailovskii's characterisation of the subjective anthropocentric era. He supplements his study of Louis Blanc's philosophy of history by an accurate estimate of Descartes' subjectivism; but he fails to distinguish adequately between epistemological and critical subjectivism, on the one hand, and sentimental or "romanicist" subjectivism, on the other. In both respects the
