Note 66 — 1896

Aphrikan Alexandrovich Spier (1837–1890), a remarkable Russian philosopher, who lived many years in Germany and who wrote his works in German: Thinking and Reality, Morality and Religious, etc. Tolstoi was then reading his principal work, Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thinking and Reality)—in a letter of 1896 to Countess S. A. Tolstoi, Tolstoi wrote: “I am reading a newly discovered philosopher, Spier, and am rejoicing.... A very useful book, destroying many superstitions, especially the superstition of materialism.” (The Letters of Count L. N. Tolstoi to his Wife, Moscow, 1913, page 510.)