In his two-volume magnum opus 
Polozhitel'nye zadachi filosofii (
The Positive Tasks of Philosophy),
 L. Lopatin (1855-1920), who taught at Moscow University, defended the 
possibility of metaphysical knowledge. He claimed that empirical 
knowledge is limited to appearances, whereas metaphysics yields 
knowledge of the true nature of things. Although Lopatin saw Hegel and 
Spinoza as the definitive expositors of rationalistic idealism, he 
rejected both for their very transformation of concrete relations into 
rational or logical ones. Nevertheless, Lopatin affirmed the role of 
reason particularly in philosophy in conscious opposition to, as he saw 
it, Solovyov's ultimate surrender to religion. In the first volume, he 
attacked materialism as itself a metaphysical doctrine that elevates 
matter to the status of an absolute that cannot explain the particular 
properties of individual things or the relation between things and 
consciousness. In his second volume, Lopatin distinguishes mechanical 
causality from "creative causality," according to which one phenomenon 
follows another, though with something new added to it. Despite his 
wealth of metaphysical speculation, quite foreign to most contemporary 
readers, Lopatin's observations on the self or ego derived from 
speculation that is not without some interest. Denying that the self has
 a purely empirical nature, Lopatin emphasized that the undeniable 
reality of time demonstrated the non-temporality of the self, for 
temporality could only be understood by that which is outside time. 
Since the self is extra-temporal, it cannot be destroyed, for that is an
 event in time. Likewise, in opposition to Solovyov, Lopatin held that 
the substantiality of the self is immediately evident in consciousness.
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