Psychology (scientific, not metaphysical) has long ago destroyed this illusion that man strives only for pleasure, or, to put it more simply, for happiness, that this is the only goal of life. This could be safely asserted in the eighteenth century by Helvétius, but in our time it is only out of ignorance to assert such a position with aplomb. Happiness is a consequence of man's moral life, but never an end; A certain degree of contentment is a condition of a developed life, but again it is not the goal. Morality is an independent quality, an indestructible quality, and this is primarily a psychological fact that can be denied only by sophistry, by violence against the very essence of human nature. I return to the ultimate instance of progressive hedonism, the human personality developed in all respects. In order for this principle not to be completely meaningless, we must postulate as its content mental, moral, and aesthetic development. But mental development is an approach to truth, moral to good, aesthetic to beauty. Filling the life of the human person with the highest content, we inevitably run into the ideas of truth, goodness and beauty, which turn out to be higher than any happiness and contentment, since only they make happiness sublime, worthy of a man, and not a pig. Here hedonism clearly leads to suicide. Let us, however, reproduce the further arguments of hedonists, utilitarians, and evolutionists in ethics. Truth, goodness, and beauty, we are told, are only social utilities in the human struggle for life. Marxism will especially insist that all so-called "ideology" is only social utility. Illusionism is the Marxist point of view on spiritual goods. Here begins the same hopeless circle, and I would ask the reader to pay special attention to this. We are told that philosophy, morality, art, in the word "ideology," exist for life, that they are valuable only as utilities in the social life of people, and in a given epoch as utilities in solving the "social question" of our days. The solution of the "social question" should put people's lives in order. And what is life itself for, the life for which everything is for? Life for life, answers the highest wisdom of our age. This answer is too true, and therefore it does not say anything yet; Life is only the totality of all life processes. But the life for which everything is and which is for itself is not the digestion of food, for this is not why we build "dwellings for people." And I say: everything is for life, but for a sublime life, for a life of truth, goodness and beauty, and by this I recognize the existence of the highest goal of life and its highest meaning. The question of the meaning and purpose of life is eternal, it cannot be eradicated from the human soul by any positive evolutionary phrases, and it is impossible to appreciate sufficiently highly such writers as Tolstoy and Ibsen, who pose this old and ever-new question with extraordinary force. From all the above arguments, the most important conclusion naturally suggests itself, that progress and perfection are higher than happiness and contentment. The reactionary nature of utilitarianism and hedonism, their profound contradiction to the very idea of progress, has been pointed out more than once, and this indication is absolutely correct. Progress presupposes the supreme, universally obligatory goal of the social life of mankind.

In another place I have tried to show, on the basis of Kant, that the fundamental principle of morality and the formal condition of all moral good is the end in itself of the human person and the equivalence of all human persons. Some may think that this is an old eudaemonistic principle that appeals to the happiness of the harmoniously developed personality. This would be a gross mistake, testifying to the inability to orient oneself in the highest innermost demands of the human spirit. First of all, we recognize the absolute value of man as an end in itself, and this idea cannot be arrived at empirically. Further, when we recognize the sanctity of man as an end in itself, and his equivalence with every other man as an end in itself, we do not have in mind utility and happiness, and we do not regard our ultimate ethical idea as merely a historically worked out useful condition for the same happiness of men. Man is a holy end in itself, he is not a creature who digests food and receives pleasant satisfaction from it, no, he is a spiritual being, the bearer of truth, goodness and beauty, the realization of the highest truth; For this end in itself, perfection and progress are higher than satisfaction and happiness. For a consistent hedonist, the word man, insofar as it has an ethical meaning, is an empty sound, a beautiful phrase, but for us this word is full of high meaning and significance. The development of the historical personality into man is the triumph of spiritual values, eternal and absolute values, without which the life of men is not yet human life, without which it is so hideously empty and aimless, so bourgeois in the crudest and truest sense of the word.

There is a legend that metaphysical idealism is an abstraction detached from life, that positive evolutionary science is much closer to life. This is, first of all, the greatest psychological lie. "Metaphysics, as Struve put it, is much richer than experience and much closer to reality, i.e., to the fullness of human experience." Only the point of view of metaphysical idealism comes close to the integral experiences of the human soul, only here does the human soul find complete and all-round satisfaction. I even venture to express an idea that may at once seem like a paradox: every living acting man, a man who seeks truth, who does justice and goodness, or who contemplates beauty, is a metaphysician-idealist. You are searching for the truth, and this search fills your life with sublime content and meaning, which you feel and experience directly, but by doing so you already assume from the starting point that truth is not an empty sound, that truth is a value, an absolute value that you do not yet know, but which you must know. The evolutionist will now begin to show you how knowledge has developed from the zoological state to you, and will end by recognizing the idea of truth, which is absolutely present to you as a living, searching being, only a useful illusion, he will make a chemical analysis, and nothing will remain of the valuable experience which constitutes the intimate nature of your spirit. In this way, a scientific proposition may be obtained, but it will turn out to be inopportune, since you are not asking about it at the moment, you will be interested in it another time. The evolutionist with his constant call to turn to mollusks to explain everything in the world, including your search for truth, is right in his partial field, but he does not have the last word in the development of the worldview. Philosophical idealism, by its very nature, always calls forward to the eternal values that must be realized in life, and it comes close to you, to your soul, thirsting for truth, it supports the voice of your consciousness, loudly declaring the value of your search, a value that no evolutionism can encroach upon. As a living person who is aware of the great importance of a moral problem, you say: this is good and this is evil, good is a value, I feel it as something unconditionally valuable, and I want to serve the good and fight evil. The moment you establish an independent quality of good in your soul, recognize its absolute value and serve it, you are performing the greatest act of your life, true worship, service to the God of truth. But then the evolutionist comes, calls you back to the study of mollusks, and invites you to show you at once that everything you experience as sacred is only a useful illusion in the struggle for existence, that moral consciousness is dissolved into some particles that have nothing to do with morality, and that all this is irrefutably proved by the level of the moral ideals of fish. Every social fighter for justice is a supporter of "natural law", he calls for truth in human relations, for the assertion of eternal human rights, he is an idealist and accepts a martyr's crown for the idea of truth-justice, which he will experience as an absolute value. The evolutionist will try to cool his idealistic call for justice, he will try to show in an evolutionist way that the "natural right" of man, which the idealist-fighter is aware of, which he so ardently desires to put into practice, is a pure illusion and that it originated in such and such a way from mollusks. Only philosophical idealism affirms and substantiates the thirst for truth and justice with which the life of practical idealists is filled, it recognizes the absolute value of moral good and the natural right of man. The developed human soul contemplates beauty and admires it, it feels that "beauty is a great power" – and experiences the feeling of beauty as something of absolute value. Man strives for beauty in his feelings, in works of art, in external nature, and this striving elevates him above worldly vulgarity. Evolutionary science does not know beauty as a value that elevates us, it decomposes it into molecules and shows the development of the sense of beauty from the animal world to the aesthetically refined man of our time. The critical method in philosophy, proclaimed by Kant, takes the developed human consciousness and analyzes it, firmly believing that in it one can find the key to the mystery of knowledge and morality rather than in the consciousness of some medusa.

But this does not in the least encroach on the legitimacy and necessity of the genetic method of research. All of the above is not directed against evolutionary science, which we revere no less than any evolutionist, but is only a protest against the sovereignty of the positive evolutionary point of view and a defense of the rights of philosophical idealism, which is closer to the experiences of the human soul, more vital in the broadest sense of the word than evolutionary science, which performs only one special function of life. At present, it is impossible not to be an evolutionist, but in order for the theory of development to acquire philosophical meaning and significance, it needs to be reworked. The scientific-philosophical theory of development must first of all understand what many evolutionists do not understand: already Democritus knew that nihil ex nihilo, life cannot develop from the absence of life, the psychic from the absence of the psychic, morality from the absence of morality, knowledge from the absence of knowledge, beauty from the absence of beauty. There must be something that develops. It is time to put an end to the accounts with the mechanical-materialistic conception of the world, which decomposes every quality into a certain number of material particles, from which everything in the world miraculously proceeds. It is necessary to recognize the qualitative independence of the elements of the universe; The world in its development unfolds only that content which in an undeveloped state was eternally given.

In order to turn the theory of development into a theory of progress, it is necessary to introduce a teleological principle. Progress is the movement of the being towards the ought, it is the triumph of the ought in the ought. Progress can have no other meaning, and in the philosophy of progress we must return to the great idealists of the past, especially to Fichte, without in the least betraying the traditions of realistic science in general, and realistic sociology in particular. The whole meaning of social development, which makes this development progress, lies only in the fact that it is the only way of discovering what is due in the life of mankind, i.e., of such spiritual values as truth in human knowledge, goodness in human will, beauty in human feelings. Idealist metaphysics must understand this social and world progress as a movement towards the supreme goal of existence, that single truth in the name of which all the affairs of the world must be carried out. Everything that is true, just, and beautiful in the life of mankind is immortal, just as immortal is that eternal and absolute truth to which we partake in our service to good and our struggle against evil. And evil, that evil which makes itself felt so tangibly in empirical reality, from the highest point of view is only "the unfound path to good," and it is doomed to a shameful death, to an inglorious death, even more humiliating than any punishment. Peer Gynt, in Ibsen's wonderful play, prefers to accept the torments of hell than to go rafting, and appeals to his great sins, but in vain: he has not done anything great in evil, and in his insignificance he has proved worthy of only one fate: to go on an alloy from which spoons are made. Evil is negative and insignificant through and through, the great in evil that history knows is only an optical illusion, in it the power of good is great, and not evil, good, obscured by the historical situation in which it had to manifest itself. Such is every demonism with its strong will and strong protest. In the amoralist Fr. Nietzsche makes a majestic impression on the good that lives in him, and not evil. And the brazenly triumphant evil never impresses, its impotent nature is clear to everyone who is morally sighted. The deep tragedy of human life lies not so much in the conflict between good and evil, as in the diversity and complexity of the good itself. Such, for example, is the truly tragic conflict between the striving for the embodiment of justice in human relations and the desire to freely create truth and beauty in one's life. Tragic writers depict the clash of human passions with moral duty, but great passions are not evil in themselves. Fichte's doctrine of the active Self and of the world as the material of duty, clothed in a sensual form, has, I think, an undying significance and is one of the greatest metaphysical conceptions embodying the idealistic spirit of progress. Evil is only an insufficient realization of duty in the sensible world, an insufficient approximation of existence to an ideal goal, and therefore the nature of evil is completely negative.

We may be asked: where is absolute truth, absolute goodness, absolute beauty, point out the content of these ideas to which you constantly appeal. There is a misunderstanding in this formulation of the question. No man, no historical epoch can claim to possess absolute truth, goodness and beauty, which are attained only throughout progress, as its ultimate goal. Any other point of view would contradict the idea of eternal development, progress would be transformed into the moment of finding the absolute. But everything in the life of mankind has a value only according to the degree of approximation to these ideas, which are absolute in their significance. The content of the entire spiritual culture of mankind is relative, but it acquires meaning only as a striving for the absolute.

Recently, from the lips of P. B. Struve there was an appeal to return to Lassalle, and I can only wholeheartedly join in this appeal. In his philosophical and idealist spirit, Lassalle stands above Marx, it was to him that the idealist interpretation of the "idea of the fourth estate" belonged, it was he who showed with extraordinary force the universal character of this idea and invested it with valuable moral content. And in our struggle for idealism we must find a point of support in Lassalle, his historical image sufficiently shows how progressive the nature of philosophical idealism is. A great task lies ahead: while maintaining a sober realism and an understanding of the need for material means, to introduce an idealistic spirit into the social movement. Lassalle understood this necessity, he understood it more deeply and broadly than Marx. At the moment, it is especially necessary to insist on it. The ideologists of the new society must not allow bourgeois souls to enter this society, they must prepare a person with a valuable life content. The progressive intelligentsia of our time has to work on the spiritual regeneration of those elements of society that should form the cornerstone of the future, and this spiritual regeneration must be closely intertwined with the social struggle that prepares "dwellings for young people." And high "towers" can and should be built on "dwellings". If philistine contentment and bourgeois satiety settle in these dwellings, then, of course, it is possible to build them, but it is unlikely that such work is capable of particularly inspiring, it is unlikely that the consciousness of the builders will be particularly elevated. We think that this will not happen, that a new person will settle in the "dwellings of the future", a spiritually reborn, a person with a broad formula of life, a bearer of ideal values that put the seal of high meaning on life.

Along with the social democratization of society, there should be its spiritual aristocracy. We cannot wait for a miracle, we cannot expect that on the next birthday of a new society a new man with broad spiritual horizons will suddenly appear, if the day before he was full of spiritual bourgeoisness and the formula of his life was unusually narrow, if behind the material means of struggle he did not see its ideal aims. The modern social struggle builds "dwellings for people," it must also create the souls of people for whom dwellings are only a means, and this cannot be postponed in the hope that everything will somehow happen by itself, it must be done, it must be done from today. Otherwise, we run the risk of entering a new society, having completely lost our idealism on the way, with small souls, still the same bourgeois, but safely digesting food and prospering. What a terrible, truly tragic contradiction: we were ready to accept the crown of martyrdom for our ideal and to manifest the greatness of the soul, but the ideal itself turns out to be so philistinely flat and insignificant, there is no place for the greatness of the soul in it. It is not surprising if, under such conditions, the man of the future "yearns for the lot of the fighter and prophet of cherished ideas." This contradiction is partly due to the dialectical conception of social development with its theory of the necessity of social cataclysm (Zusammenbruchs-theorie) and, in general, to that mechanical and automatic interpretation of the historical process into which orthodox Marxism often falls.

Marxism made an attempt to provide an evolutionary-scientific foundation for idealism with the help of the dialectical method, and many "orthodox" still see the greatness of the spirit in the confession of the theory of Zusammenbruch of capitalist society. But it was precisely here that Marxism stumbled, as modern reality and modern philosophical thought irrefutably prove. This attempt turned out to be a kind of evolutionary-historical utopianism, scientifically inadmissible, and at the same time there is no idealism in it, and there cannot be. Idealism is in the depth and breadth of the ideal, idealism is in the active struggle for the realization of the ideal and selfless devotion to it, idealism is in the greatness of the spirit that penetrates the social movement, the spirit that fights and in whose name one fights. The roots of idealism are metaphysical, and the evolutionary historical process creates only the conditions for its manifestation. The dialectical theory of the necessity of social catastrophe is not only unscientific, logically absurd, and in contradiction with the facts of life, but also profoundly anti-idealistic. A new society is created at the dialectical moment of the negation of the old society, evil will pass into its opposite, into good, since it will become intolerably great in its internal contradictions. Where is the real place of idealism, on this or that side of the dialectical border? I think that there will be no room for idealism if this point of view is carried to its logical conclusion.

По эту сторону грани идеализм преждевременен, что и утверждают «ортодоксы»; социальное зло так велико и обострено, что жизнь людей должна быть поглощена материальными средствами борьбы; психология производителей с точки зрения теории Zusammenbruch'a не может расширяться и углубляться. А по ту сторону грани? По ту сторону идеализм, может быть, каким-нибудь непостижимым чудом и возникнет, но этот идеализм находится вне нашего современного кругозора. Если не проникнуться идеалистическим мировоззрением, о котором я говорю в своей статье, то мы должны будем признать, что по ту сторону грани старого общества идеализм окажется запоздавшим, он уже не нужен будет, так как буржуазное довольство распространится на всех людей и души покроются слишком толстым слоем жира, чтобы идеалистически протестовать против беспощадной пошлости жизни. Тот довольный и счастливый человек, который возьмет на себя смелость сказать, что лебединая песнь идеализма в истории человечества уже пропета, будет самым отвратительным типом и, если он будет прав, то смертный приговор человечеству и его высшему духовному бытию будет подписан.

Мы понимаем несколько иначе грань старого и нового общества, в этом отношении мы стоим ближе к Лассалю. Восход солнца нового общества есть не диалектически совершающийся катаклизм, а появление новой всемирно-исторической эпохи, которая приносит с собой новую великую идею, олицетворяющую собой общечеловеческий прогресс. Лассаль указал на «идею» современной эпохи и на ее носителя в определенном общественном классе84*. Момент окончательной реализации новой общественной формы в эмпирической действительности не имеет принципиального значения, он может быть более или менее далек и во всяком случае он не может быть социальным Zusammenbruch'oM, как никогда в прошлой истории человечества не бывало подобного способа осуществления великой всемирно- исторической идеи в новой форме общественности . Велик тот идеалистический дух, который живет в социальном движении и возвышает человека над мелкой повседневной борьбой, велико то восходящее солнце, которое освещает и согревает жизнь борцов за новое общество. Тут мы принципиально отличаем и отмежевываем себя от всех социальных реформаторов, которые неспособны видеть ничего великого за своими малыми делами, которые не могут ни сильно желать и протестовать, ни глубоко понимать и предвидеть. Нет ничего более плоского и пошлого, как ставить идеализм в зависимость от быстроты или внезапности осуществления идеала: в этом сказывается полное непонимание природы идеализма. В принципе идеализм сохраняется даже при полной неосуществимости идеала, так как и тогда возможна идеалистическая победа, остается право и обязанность умереть, сохраняя веру в правоту своего идеала.

Трудностей предстоит гораздо больше, чем предполагает ортодоксальный марксизм со своей верой в механическую необходимость крушения старых форм и рождения новых. Но наличность этих трудностей должна только возвышать дух, который призван их преодолеть. Мы суживаем область того, что необходимо произойдет, и расширяем область того, что должно быть создано, а это и есть усиление человеческого идеализма, в котором категория должного и справедливого господствуют над категориями сущего и необходимого. Новое общество будет дитя человеческого духа, эволюционно-исторический процесс создаст лишь почву для его идеалистической работы. Такая точка .зрения заключает в себе частичную реабилитацию утопистов. Их ошибки уже не страшны, а правоту их слишком забывают.

Я уже слышу голос всеобесцвечивающего шаблона, который злорадно говорит: вы ходите под ручку с Берн- штейном, именно Бернштейн резко протестует против веры в необходимость социальной катастрофы и этим разоблачает свою буржуазную природу. Прежде всего мне нет дела до того, какую комбинацию воззрений представляет собою Бернштейн, частичное совпадение моих воззрений с его воззрениями ни к чему меня не обязывает. А главное я вот на чем настаиваю. Бернштейн — законное дитя ортодоксального марксизма, он унаследовал от него реалистические элементы, которые старается усилить, и он прав, насколько в нем говорит голос современной социальной действительности, отличающейся от той действительности, которая была 50 лет тому назад. Но у Бернштейна недостает теоретической силы мысли и практической силы духа. В ортодоксальном марксизме Бернштейн не нашел идеализма, а сам он оказался неспособным к самостоятель-

2 Н.А. Бердяев ному творчеству, он не из тех, которые прокладывают новые пути; он подвел итоги фактам жизни, громко говорившим о том, что социальное движение безвозвратно потеряло романтизм, окрашивавший его некогда в ярко идеалистический цвет, и... остался без идеализма. Остался без идеализма не один Бернштейн, его собственная тенденция принизить дух социального движения для нас не особенно важна, важно то, что самое социальное движение наших дней остается без идеализма. Воскресить прошлое, воскресить то настроение, которое было вызвано иной социально-исторической обстановкой, теперь нельзя, поэтому в борьбе за идеализм нужно идти по новому пути, нужно творить, нужно влить новое идеалистическое содержание в те формы, которые создаются современным социальным развитием. Это не будет отказом от трезвого реализма в практике и в теории, который, конечно, должен быть сохранен, а только напоминанием о том, во имя чего этот реализм существует.