The Russian philosophers of history and of religion accurately gauged the result, though not the essential nature, of this peculiar historical process. Metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically, they rejected German philosophy as solipsism, and they were afraid that crime would be the outcome of the philosophic revolution.
But two distinct moods prevail among those who voice such judgments. Some, like Bělinskii and Herzen, when they speak of crime, think of murder and revolution; others, like Bakunin, think of suicide.
The analysis of Dostoevskii's struggle against nihilism will convince us that Bělinskii and Bakunin did in fact both succeed in accurately diagnosing the great problem of the age. Since the eighteenth century, in Europe as well as in Russia, there has been manifest a peculiar increase in the impulse to suicide, whilst. simultaneously there has occurred a growth of the revolutionary spirit.
§ 209.
SOCIOLOGISTS have not yet sufficiently analysed and elucidated the concept of historical stages. We have to ask why our own time is generally felt and proclaimed to be new. In what does its newness consist? What is the essential characteristic of the contrasted older epoch?
In these studies I have frequently expressed my dissent from historicism. More especially I have objected to the theory of Comte and of Marx that during successive stages of development man is transformed by the influence of peculiar objective historical forces, not physically alone, but psychically as well. In my view, man evolves himself, forms hiniself; and I consider that this self-evolution begins at the very outset of historical development. Ina word, there is no epistemological warrant for the presumed coming of the superman; the modern age is distinguished solely by the fuller unfolding of forces that have previously existed in a less developed state.
As I see the matter, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mankind grew fully conscious of this fact. This is the world-wide historical significance of Humist scepticism of the philosophy of the enlightenment, and above all of the Kantian criticism and of the great revolution. Man became fully conscious of the opposition between myth and science.
