Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/100

 their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? The simplification of life, the decrease of "vital" demands, strips the arts and culture of the West of all efficacy and worth. To these men, whose longing was for the inner, spiritual freedom of man, Western progress, with all it connoted, was an abomination. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the Westernizers, the rationalists, strongly arrayed against them. The "simplifiers" negatived progress and culture. The Westernizers, rallying to the defense, proclaimed that wisdom and knowledge are the same as power and freedom. They viewed life as an unceasing struggle, as a great adventure on which man is embarked. And the goal, whatever it be, cannot be attained unless man overcomes the forces of Nature, and subjects them to human ends. Whereas the logical outcome of Simplification is the complete merging and loss of personality in the indeterminate mass, the inevitable result of the other view is the bold assertion of individuality. The former promises the millenium through the power of "Abnegation," the latter demands a different world by virtue of "Struggle"; the first begins with love, and ends with Surrender, the second begins with Strife, and ends with—Humanity.

Which of these two views of life is nihilistic,—a negation? Both. The Simplifiers deny progress, and art, and culture, and affirm the inner spiritual life. The Rationalists affirm the whole of life—past, present, and future—for they believe in progress, growth, development. But they also deny the past and present in rejecting authority and tradition. These things were as nothing to them, and, as Hertzen, their spokesman, says, "Nothingness should not be made everything." It is this negation of the Westernizers that has earned for some of them the name of the Early Nihilists. Just as the Simplifiers annihilated knowledge and culture by refusing to give them a place in their conception of the full life, so the Early Nihilists did away with everything that, to them, was not real. And what is their test of reality? The real, said men like Hertzen, is whatever frees the individual and, in the end, humanity, from the bonds with which they are tied. This means that everything is "suspected," judged, tested from the standpoint of "reality." So that the attitude of the Early Nihilists is one of skepticism; they accept nothing on its socially stamped valuation. They are rationalists, and skeptics par excellence. But it is well to note that the theoretical Nihilism we are considering, does not mean universal negation. As a matter of fact, its upholders had started with an affirmation,