Vladimir Solov′ëv was not the only Russian philosopher who revolted against materialism and positivism in the 1870s, nor was the religious thrust of his revolt the only direction taken by Russian thinkers who defended philosophy against incursions from the empiricists.

After the appearance of Solov′ëv's Crisis of Western Philosophy in 1874, another writer, also near the beginning of a distinguished philosophical career (though twenty-two years Solov′ëv's senior), published a sharply critical review of the work, calling it a reduction of philosophy to religion. “Religion is not philosophy,” he insisted in conclusion. “Mr. Solov′ëv has based his dissertation on the false assumption that philosophy and religion have the same subject, and on the basis of that opinion he has … presented every philosophical movement as something unneeded.” The author of these lines was Aleksei Aleksandrovich Kozlov (1831–1901), one of a growing number of Russian philosophers who in the 1870s and later championed speculative philosophy as a discipline separate from both the natural sciences and religion.

Among these philosophical purists, Kozlov was the first of a subset who advanced a type of ontological idealism new to Russia, though its pedigree is traceable to the pre-Socratics and though it was developed in modern times by Leibniz. Although the outlook is sometimes loosely called “personalism” because of its focus on individual entities such as Leibniz's “monads,” the established term for it (and the term Kozlov used) is panpsychism (in Russian, panpsikhizm).