Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/298

272 the world, saying, "The lord of the world is the colossal self-consciousness, knowing itself to be the true God." Thus Hegel's pantheism and panlogism manifested itself as a monarchical universal absolutism "The state is the divine will as a contemporary spirit evolving itself in a real form and as the organisation of a world."

Homjakov, as an adversary of the religious enlightenment; was an opponent of the political enlightenment and of rationalism. He opposed Hegel's theory of the state, and accepted the views of Schlegel, those of Savigny's romanticist successors, and their historical theory of law. Upon the same outlook was based his opposition to Roman law and its logic, and his preference for customary law in accordance with the doctrines of the historical school of law. The historical school of law conceived the folk-spirit mythically and mystically, quite in the sense of the romanticists and without any precise analysis of the concept. It was all the more natural that this should please the romanticist slavophils, since Puchta, the leader of the Germanist jurists, found in God the ultimate source of law. Homjakov regarded the state, to use an expression of his own, as a living and organic protective mantle for society (that is to say for the folk). Such was the normal state, but there exist also abnormal and morbid states, those whose activities develop inorganically, without the aid of the folk and in opposition to the folk. The living protection then becomes a dry crust, a fistula in history, filled with the dust of corrupted nations It is obvious that here Homjakov is thinking of the state of Peter and his successors, and of the Russian bureaucracy.

Just as little as he analysed the concepts church and state, did Homjakov analyse the concepts of nation and folk-spirit. In opposition to the German historical school of law and in opposition to those romanticists who were radical in politics, he assigned to the nation but two spheres of activity, art and science. These two activities alone, he said, are national in the strict sense of the term, these alone are expressions of the folk-spirit. The German romanticists did not thus emphasise the national aspect of science. They regarded art, and above all literature, language, morals, law, and in some cases also