The second example of how reactionary phenomena testify to true progress is the character of present-day militarism: with such enormous armaments and such an extreme intensification of national rivalry and enmity, such an unprecedented hesitation to start a war! Everyone involuntarily feels and understands that with the present all-round coherence between the various parts of mankind it will be impossible to localize an armed conflict, and that the unprecedented enormity of forces in terms of the number of troops and the lethality of weapons will present war in all its horror, never before seen, and will make it morally and materially impossible to repeat it. So, one of two things: either, in spite of all the militarism, the war will not begin, or if it does, it will be the last. Militarism will eat war. Armed political strife between nations will inevitably cease, just as their constant strife between separate regions and cities within countries has ceased.

Local history shows how here or there the land gathered around the leaders of the people in difficult, intricate, and often crooked ways, and how little by little the national consciousness grew and developed. But universal history also shows us how the whole earth, the whole of humanity, gathers around the invisible but powerful center of Christian culture in even more difficult and complex ways, and how, in spite of all obstacles, the consciousness of universal unity and solidarity is growing and strengthening. This analogy between the national and the world "gathering of the earth" could be carried still further, but I confine myself to the obvious and indisputable features.

Thus, history (and consequently the entire world process) has a goal that we undoubtedly know, a goal that is all-embracing and at the same time sufficiently definite for us to be able to participate consciously in its achievement; For with regard to every idea, every feeling, and every human deed, it is always possible to decide by reason and conscience whether it agrees with or contradicts the ideal of universal solidarity, whether it is directed towards the realization of true all-unity[99] or contradicts it. And if so, where is the right for any human activity to separate itself from the general movement, to withdraw into itself, to declare itself its own and only goal? And in particular, where are the rights of aesthetic separatism? No: art is not for art, but for the realization of that fullness of life which necessarily includes a special element of art, beauty, but does not include it as something separate and self-sufficient, but in an essential and internal connection with the rest of the content of life.

To reject the fantastic alienation of beauty and art from the general movement of world life, to recognize that artistic activity does not have in itself any special higher object, but only in its own way, by its own means, serves the common life goal of mankind – this is the first step towards true positive aesthetics. This step in Russian literature was taken about forty years ago by the author of an aesthetic treatise, which (together with other, less important, but also not devoid of interest studies by the same writer) has been very conveniently reprinted just now, in view of the revival of aesthetic separatism in our country. In order to point out the positive significance and merit of this old, but not obsolete, treatise, I do not at all close my eyes either to its many particular shortcomings, or to the general incompleteness of the view it represents. At one time, many were sure that the author of "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" had the last word in this field [100]. I am so far from such a thought that I assert just the opposite: he did not say the last, but only the first word of true aesthetics. But I consider it unjust to demand of the one who has done something that he should do everything, and I think that the inevitable insufficiency of the first step will of itself be eliminated when further steps are taken.

II

If our author subordinates art to reality, it is certainly not in the sense in which other contemporary writers have declared that "boots are more important than Shakespeare." He only asserts that the beauty of real life is higher than the beauty of the creations of artistic fantasy. At the same time, he defends the reality of beauty against Hegelian aesthetics, for which the beautiful "is only a phantom" stemming from the lack of penetration of the gaze, not enlightened by philosophical thought, before which the apparent fullness of the manifestation of the idea in a single object (i.e., beauty) disappears, so that "the higher the development of thought, the more the beautiful disappears before it, and, finally, for fully developed thinking there is only the true. but there is no beauty"[102].

In contrast to this view, our author recognizes beauty as an essential property of real objects, and insists on its actual reality, not only for man, but also in nature and for nature. "Understanding beauty as the fullness of life, we will have to admit that the striving for life, which permeates the whole of nature, is at the same time the striving for the production of beauty. If we are to see in nature in general not ends but only results, and therefore cannot call beauty the goal of nature, we cannot but call it the essential result to the production of which the forces of nature are directed. The unintentional, unconscious nature of this trend does not in the least interfere with its reality, just as the unconsciousness of the geometrical tendency in the bee, the unconsciousness of symmetry in the vegetative force, does not in the least interfere with the correctness of the hexagonal structure of the cells of the honeycomb, the symmetry of the two halves of the leaf.

The author devoted a significant part of his treatise to a detailed proof of the idea "that a work of art can have an advantage over reality only in two or three insignificant respects and necessarily remains far below it in its essential qualities" [104]. In this extensive argument (pp. 38-81) there is much that is naïve (it must not be forgotten that this is a youthful dissertation), some controversial things are asserted unfoundedly, and others, indisputable, are proved with pedantic completeness; but all these shortcomings and excesses should not hide from us the fact that the thought being proved is true, to such an extent that the reader, dissatisfied with the author's lengthy prose, can find a brief but accurate expression of the same view at the opposite pole of our literature in the following poem by Fet:

To whom the crown is: the goddess of beauty,

Or in the mirror her image?

The poet is confused when you are amazed

Rich in his imagination.

Not I, my friend, but God's world is rich:

In a speck of dust he cherishes life and multiplies,