Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/183

 of French and English ideas. The theories of the "ideologues," and particularly those of Destutt de Tracy, had made some impression on the reformers known as the Decembrists; and after the second half of the sixties, the ideas of Comte had some vogue among Russian cultured classes. The views expressed by Mill and Spencer on the Positive Philosophy appeared at once in Russian translations, and nearly all their principal works became accessible to Russian readers. Also modern French science and learning proved to be of great value for the development of Russian thought: Cauchy and Ampère, Dumas and Berthelot, Pasteur and Bernard, St Simon, Proudhon and Fourier, Guizot, Thierry and Michelet, Renan, Fustel de Coulanges and others exercised an influence, partly personal and partly literary, on Russian students. Contemporary English science and learning produced similar results: the great ideas and discoveries of Faraday and Thomson (Lord Kelvin), of Dalton and Maxwell, of Lyell and Darwin, the acute investigations and liberal opinions of Bentley and Gibbon, the brilliant narrative of Macaulay and bold generalizations of Buckle, the suggestive inferences of Tylor, Maine and other writers, could not pass unnoticed in Russia, and some of these writers exercised a considerable influence on Russian minds: for instance, Darwin's investigations into the origin of species were expounded by Kutorga at the University of Petrograd as early as 1860 and found many Russian supporters; and the diffusion of Buckle's ideas among the cultured classes astonished one of his countrymen, when travelling in Russia in the seventies.