POLEMICAL.
APPENDIX: 1) Materials for the History of Philosophy in Russia; 2) Transactions of the Moscow Psychological Society.
Russia is perhaps that country of all civilised nations of which we know least, and even such authors as Tolstoï who are read all over the world, are perhaps, severed from their surroundings, not correctly understood by us as the Russian understands them. The present magazine, Problems of Philosophy and Psychology, being a strictly scientific periodical, is less peculiarly Russian without entirely losing the national characteristics of its home. The intention of the editor has been to develop and to give a chance for a further development of an independent Russian philosophy. The philosophy of the West, we are informed, does not satisfy the Russian mind; the English philosophy is one-sided empirical, the French mathematical, the German too abstract and logical. The Russian philosophy aspires to bring about a well-balanced and harmonious method of thinking in which reason, sentiment, and action—science, art and religion—are reconciled. Professor Grote, the editor of Problems of Philosophy and Psychology, by placing the ethical interest in the foreground, hopes that Russian philosophy will become "the salvation of the world from evil."
Among the book reviews we find six pages devoted to The Ethical Problem, by Dr. Paul Carus, a translation of which was made for us by Prof. A. Gunlogsen of Chicago. We find however that the reviewer, Mr. P. Astafiew, mixes the position of the author up with that of the societies for ethical culture. If he represents the Magazine's view of reconciling Science, Art, and Religion, it is sure that Religion in the shape Of his peculiar creed would get the lion's share. The interest of the little book consists to him in the fact that it clearly characterises a singular anarchical condition; by having lost the old faith, it is utterly unable to replace it. It is an assumption to base ethics and religion on positive and scientific foundations; yet the attempt is curious as a symptom of the times and especially of "enlightened" America.
In answer to one of the most important errors in Mr. Astafiew's review, we have to state that basing ethics upon the facts of life, verified and verifiable by science, does not mean that we have to study psychology in order to be moral. A man can lead a moral life without understanding anything of ethics, the science of morality. Ethics is not an indispensable condition of morality. But it is of paramount importance that ethics—as a science—is not an impossibility. The data of moral life, the impulses of duty, of conscience, of the ought, are not mystical or supernatural, i. e. extra-natural, standing in contradiction to other natural facts; they are not, as the intuitionists maintain, "unanalysable," they are not, as Professor Adler, the founder of the Ethical Societies declares, beyond the pale of science; "the ladder of science," he says, "does not reach so far." The data of moral life are facts of the natural development of man and of human society; they can be investigated by science, they can be compared with other natural facts, they can be classified and understood.
A man can throw a stone without understanding anything of Newton's laws, he can build a hut without understanding architecture. Yet for that reason the study of ballistics and of architecture are not useless. The man who has studied architecture may bridge the Niagara, which the mound-builders were unable to do. And if a bridge breaks down while the mounds of the mound-builders are still standing, it proves nothing against architecture. An ethical student may have proposed untenable theories in ethics, he may have preached a wrong morality, and may have gone astray himself: all that would prove nothing against the science of ethics. It is to be expected that ethical knowledge, if it leaveneth the whole lump of human society, will raise man's moral life higher, as surely as our knowledge of architecture made it possible that we now build palaces upon the places where in former times stood the wigwams of the Indians. (Moscow, 1891.)
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