Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/190

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176
Science and Learning in Russia

"Westerners," for instance Kavelin, were not entirely satisfied by Hegel.

Somewhat later the materialism of Moleschott, Feuerbach, Marx and others passed through a similar phase; Pisarev, for instance, turned from materialism to positivism, and the "anthropological principle" of Chernyshevsky was examined by Yurkevich.

The Positivism of Comte, though assimilated by Vyrubov and propagated by Lezevich before he exchanged it for "empirico-criticism," did not long hold the field: it was attacked by the archbishop Nikanor (Brovkovich) and by one of the foremost representatives of Russian mysticism: V. Solovyev, who was also much interested in epistemological problems, rejected it, and, in agreement with him, one of his intimate friends, Trubetskoy, gave himself up to "concrete idealism."

In modern times the critical philosophy of Kant also found itself challenged by a Russian philosopher, Karinsky: he criticised not only Positivism, but all the systems that were based on criticism; after having published some original views on inductive and deductive logic, he endeavoured to prove that intuitions of space and time can be considered as a priori notions, but that judgments on the laws of intuition (for example, mathematical axioms) proceed also from experience. Some of the ideas of Karinsky were, however, discussed by a consistent representative of Kantian philosophy—Vvedensky, the well-known critic of the metaphysical conceptions of matter, soul, etc.; his pupil Lapchin tried to prove that the laws of logic were not applicable to "things in themselves." Meantime the system of Kant encountered