I must make a reservation so that there is no misunderstanding. The practical movement connected with Marxism has enormous tasks, it is very vital, and I appreciate its importance very highly. We are talking about the theory of Marxism, about the significance of Marxism in spiritual culture, in modern searches, in determining the valuable content of life. We love life, we worship it, life is the highest good, the highest goal, the highest criterion of good and evil, all these representatives of the last days of Marxism shout in unison and try to blush and whitewash the old decaying theory. How colorless and bloodless, moderate and prudent all this is in comparison with the colorful, juicy and daring praise of the joy of life of one of the most interesting, gifted and significant writers of our time, V. V. Rozanov, No one encroaches on the practical virtue of empirio-critical and amoralistic Marxists, but the poetry of life is not their business.

The "idealists" did not respond to their "critics" and did not accept the challenge. In vain did the critics fuss and worry, trying to provoke us to polemics. There was no conspiracy on the part of the "idealists", it was the result of natural and spontaneous feelings, on which very many agreed. There was no desire to object to all these polemical exercises, he was not inspired by "criticism", it was boring even to read all this, and not only to answer. But it is time to speak in principle about polemics in general and about our polemical morals in particular.

For a long time very cruel polemical morals have reigned in our magazine literature. In this mutual eating, all our lack of culture was expressed, there was a complete disrespect for the reader and a violation of the aesthetic measure, so characteristic of our disdain for elegance. To ennoble our literary mores, to inculcate more aristocratic manners, would be no small cultural task. We are well aware that rudeness, intolerance and the lack of real inner freedom in our journalism are due to special reasons; the tense atmosphere in which the Russian writer has to live. The existing order of things develops a morbid suspicion, one censorship begets another, one violence begets another, one bureaucracy gives rise to another bureaucracy. The responsibility for this spiritual crippling of the Russian intelligentsia falls on the dark, oppressive, ruling forces of Russian society. But it is time at last to renounce spiritual freedom, the right of creativity from the encroachment of all kinds of bureaucracy, of all kinds of stereotypes that monopolize advanced thought.

What is the psychology of polemics, what spiritual motives prevail in it, what instincts of human nature does it appeal to? This question seems to me interesting and worthy of consideration.

In essence, the psychology of polemics is immoral and appeals to the lower, not the higher, sides of human nature. Listen to the polemics in literature or in oral disputes. It is always striking how much the questions about which the polemics are being conducted are forgotten, how little the truth is clarified, how much the polemicists are in slavish subordination to some third, foreign force, to the public, whose hearts each of the parties wants to attract. We make terrible sacrifices for the sake of our listeners and readers, and the capture of these little hearts has long since shielded from us the capture of truth and righteousness. There is always something demagogic in polemics, it always appeals to one or another of the instincts of the masses, and it always hides behind it the psychology of slavery to the crowd. The purpose of polemics is to win over the audience, to provoke whistles and applause, and this noise is seldom the triumph of truth. Who wins in polemics? Oh, this victory is bought not by the depth of thought, not by the power of argumentation, not by your inner truth! That is why polemics are immoral because by its very essence it calls for the judges who decide the fate of the truth – choruses, an accidental, extraneous element, little and often not understanding anything. Our usual magazine polemics always play on some strings of the reader's soul and greedily await the approval of its reader, but all this is sheer disrespect for the reader. For the present reader, dear to us, all these endless, fruitless and petty bickerings between Mr. A. and Mr. V., all these personal accounts, suspicions and accusations, all this polemical dust under which the interests of truth are buried and questions requiring clarification are forgotten. And if we want to truly respect both ourselves and our readers, we must despise polemics and polemical critics, our own polemics, we must answer the perplexities of our readers, clarify questions on their essence and ignore all polemical attacks against us, in a word, we must respond to personal polemics with an impersonal critical explanation to our readers of what is done with important and significant questions in the polemical heap.

For several years now there has been a polemic against idealism in general and against the writer of these lines in particular, and all this criticism is striking in its wretchedness, it is simply uninteresting, it simply does not inspire an answer, and it has often been ignorant and unscrupulous. Against philosophical and religious searches, people who understood nothing about philosophy and did not suffer from a religious problem made some completely inappropriate political objections. This application of political criteria to the most intimate demands of the human spirit, on the one hand, and on the other, the evaluation of the political credo according to criteria that are completely non-political, is an undoubted indicator of lack of culture, of a low level of both political and intellectual development. Let our polemicizing and critical journalists learn to make philosophical objections to philosophical assertions, let them recognize the right of the human person to the fullness of spiritual experiences, then it will be possible and necessary to talk to them in a cultured language. In the meantime, we will nevertheless try to formulate what main perplexities the polemics against "idealism" could have caused among readers.

I must make a reservation that I will object mainly for myself. "Idealism" is an extremely vague general parenthesis, it is a spiritual ferment that contains very diverse shades, and it is fraught with the most profound opposites.

"Idealism" was suspected or directly accused of being reactionary, of being double reactionary, from the scientific-educational and socio-political point of view. It is around these two points -- the relation of "idealism" to science and its relation to freedom -- that I shall concentrate my answer. From our religious-philosophical point of view, do we need scientific enlightenment and liberating progress? This is what seems to arouse great doubts, and our intelligentsia treats science and politics with religious reverence.

We will not talk about the first point for a long time, this is a very elementary, simple and almost boring question. No one has ever thought of encroaching on science. "Idealists" always sharply distinguish the field of scientific knowledge from philosophy and religion, and some of them may even be too positivists in science. The power and significance of science are absolutely irrefutable, its necessity is proved by every step of our life. And we limit the competence of science only when it interferes in something that is not its own business, when it tries to solve philosophical and religious questions. But we would also have a negative attitude towards the philosophical or religious solution of scientific questions. Another question is what role we ascribe to science, scientific enlightenment in human culture, in the course of world history. Here we must say bluntly that we assign to science a subordinate, servant role, that the point of view of rationalistic enlightenment is profoundly alien to us and to the last degree repugnant. We declare an irreconcilable struggle against rationalist culture, which distorts the spiritual nature of man, this quasi scientific complacency, this limited and stupid rejection of everything irrational and super-rational. More ingenious and profound critics could find a very firm basis of principle for polemics against us, but the elementary misunderstanding that we deny science, that we are representatives of reaction against science, does not deserve even a serious objection. Yes, reactions, but not against science, but against rationalism, against the encroachments of positivism on the fullness and integrity of human nature.

I am ready to welcome Mach's theory of scientific knowledge, because it cleanses science of all metaphysical pretensions and makes it more modest, more scientific. This does not in the least oblige me to agree with Mach's limited philosophy, quite the opposite. The more scientific and positive science is, the more philosophical, metaphysical philosophy will be, and the more religious will be religion. Scientific arguments against philosophy and religion are logically inadmissible, this is not only a mistake of rationalistic consciousness, but also an indicator of a very low intellectual culture. All this can be summed up: we revere science no less than our critics, we need it and are aware of its power at every step, but we are enemies of rationalist enlightenment and place our pathos in those aspects of the human spirit that are beyond the control of science, outside purely logical verification. And now I turn to another, much more important question.

One perplexity connected with "idealism" deserves the most careful consideration. Here we would have to deal with the most repulsive argument and the most dangerous, if it were not a complete misunderstanding. I have in mind the usual and widespread opinion that "idealism" recognises internal, metaphysical freedom and is incapable of passing to external, social freedom, that it turns away from the earth, from the struggle which is being waged with such bloody efforts for a better earthly future, in a word, that "idealism" becomes its back to emancipatory social progress.

Our critics operate very arbitrarily and to the highest degree uncritically with the concepts of "freedom," "personality," "progress," etc., only because it is so easy for them to triumphantly contradict us because they do not and cannot give themselves a philosophical account of their own thoughts and expressions, and appeal to the rather vulgar feelings of their audience. On all sides I hear indignant and mocking voices that deprive us of the right to demand external freedom, to thirst for it. In your opinion, everyone is fine as it is, each person is inwardly free and no violence can humiliate his lofty spirit. In this way, "idealism" is deprived of the right to recognize the meaning of world history, whereas it arose most of all from the need to recognize this meaning, to see it. And we see this meaning first of all in liberation, in self-liberation and liberation of the world. At the basis of the religious-philosophical teaching I would put the idea of freedom and the idea of personality, inseparably linked with it, and only then can the struggle for liberating social progress be sanctioned and comprehended. What is personality, what is freedom? Our positivistic critics know that freedom is a beautiful and alluring thing, that it is necessary to fight for the individual, they know even more that we have no freedom, and the individual is oppressed and crushed. All these are good feelings, but positivism of all kinds and shades is powerless to substantiate the ideas of personality and freedom and to lead to a philosophy of liberation, to a liberating worldview and mood. Personality and freedom must be not only the goal and result of the struggle, but also the subject of the struggle, which is what the positivists do not think enough about. Personality cannot be a product of impersonal nature, social environment, historical process; Freedom cannot be the product of necessity, natural development, it cannot be ordered and ordered. The world-historical process can be liberating only because in the very nature of the world there is creative freedom, a principle that opposes cohesion and oppressive necessity. A person can rebel against what lies outside of him, oppressive, only in the name of his own inner nature, only as an inwardly free being possessing creative energy. Otherwise, what would have risen up, who would have fought? The human personality, this metaphysical spirit, inwardly free, can be bound, enslaved, and oppressed; it has absolute value, but its dignity can be desecrated. But only a free being can fight oppression and enslavement, and not a piece of matter, not an accidental drop in the ocean of natural necessity. They do not want to understand this. The freedom-loving positivists have a very strange dilemma: only a creature that is not free by nature, only an accidental fragment of the natural and social environment, can and wants to fight for freedom, while a creature that is free by nature, a concrete spirit, a personality, is reconciled to slavery, oppression and lawlessness. And again: those who see the meaning of the world and historical process in liberation must deny the meaning of the struggle for freedom, while those who deny any meaning to world and historical development, who see in it only the necessary process of nature, must recognize the meaning of the struggle for freedom. Here we meet with some terrible misunderstanding. This misunderstanding can be summarized as follows: the free have nothing to strive for freedom, only the unfree can strive for freedom.

This judgment may seem logical if one does not delve into the content of the concepts used here. For us, freedom is the creative force of individual spiritual substance, it is the creation from within, from the depths of human nature, the authoritative self-determination of the individual. The concept of personality, human individuality, is inconceivable without freedom, as an internal determination of its nature. The creative acts of the individual are free, but he is bound by the creative acts of other personalities and by his belonging to the world as a whole, so the individual encounters at every step a "necessity" that takes the form of oppression and enslavement [93]. Therefore, the inner spiritual freedom of the human person can and should be opposed to imposed necessity, oppression, enslavement, i.e., external unfreedom. Winning freedom for himself and for others, the inwardly free person fulfills his destiny in the world, puts his creative stamp on it, defends his right to be determined only by his freedom, his inner creative power, which collides with the bound and imposed world. And that unfree object, which the positivists call man, cannot oppose itself to anything, to any external oppression, to any lack of freedom, it is not able to introduce any creative and opposing principle into this bound, slavish world. Only a free being, a spiritual being whose roots lie in the bottomless depths of being, can strive for ultimate freedom, be able to fight for it, while an unfree piece of nature would remain in slavery until the end of time.

No, Messrs. positive critics, we will not yield to you freedoms and personalities, this is our monopoly, not yours.