towards precision. Without being aware of it, Mihailovskii replaced epistemological criticism by a reliance upon authorities whom he did not venture to question. Comte, Feuerbach, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill were for him such authorities.
Of late there has been a tendency to class Mihailovskii as among the empiricist critics, and to speak of him as a precursor of Mach and Avenarius. Such a classification is admissible only in so far as it is true that Mihailovskii accepted the positivism of Comte and Mill, and was content with a purely psychological analysis. Believing with Comte that we can have no scientific knowledge of the nature of things, Mihailovskii rested content with this agnosticism. Mach and similar thinkers have moved along the same road with their revival of Hume; but Mach, Avenarius, etc., studied Kant, and took Kant's thought into account in the formulation of their own empirical standpoint, whereas Mihailovskii ignored Kant. Herein lies a notable distinction between Mihailovskii and the German Humists.
Of late certain disciples (Struve, Berdjaev, etc.) have undertaken an epistemological examination of Mihailovskii's subjective method, and have brought it into harmony with the more recent developments of German philosophy, but I cannot see that these investigations have had any noteworthy result. The "chaos" against which Mihailovskii fought still dominates the theory of cognition and the field of criticism.
Mihailovskii's psychologism can further be detected in his philosophy of religion. An effect of the religious spirit is mistaken for the very essence of religion. But an important contribution is made to the practical aspect of the problem, inasmuch as Mihailovskii demands clearness and definiteness above all in the ethical domain, and here finds his strongest standing ground. In this respect he is in agreement with Hume, but also with Kant and with more recent writers, such as Mill and Spencer. His theoretical agnosticism becomes a practical gnosis, if I may employ the word to denote his clearly conceived and deliberately chosen ethical outlook.
I have already pointed out that Mihailovskii did not study the religious problem as considered in the works of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. This seems to me very remarkable, but I cannot venture to suggest an explanation. In his analysis of the environing chaos he occasionally refers to the philosophy of
