Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/318

292 Old Semitic; (4) Indian; (5) Iranian; (6) Hebrew; (7) Greek; (8) Roman ; (9) New Semitic or Arabian ; (10) Teutono-Romance or European. (No more than passing allusion is made to the Mexican and Peruvian civilisations.)

In the natural course of development, the Slavic type is destined to separate from the Teutono-Romance or European type, and it will elaborate in a comprehensive synthesis the cultural elements that have undergone partial development at the hands of the other types. The extant types have secured a ripe development for religion alone (the Jews), for culture alone (the Greeks), or for the art of government alone (the Romans). The Teutono-Romance stocks were successful both in the political and in the cultural fields, but their civilisation has a one-sidedly scientific and industrial character, and among them the state is based on coercion. It is for this reason that Europe has lapsed into anarchy. In religion this anarchy takes the form of Protestantism; in philosophy it takes the form of materialism; and in the socio-political field it takes the form of the struggle between political democracy and economic feudalism. The Russians will be the first to effect an organic union of the four chief elements of civilisation (religion, culture in the narrower sense, political development, and socio-political organisation), and they will display their originality by furnishing the correct solution of the socio-economic problem.

Politically the task of Russia will be to organise a Slav federation, led by Russia herself. She must win Constantinople as capital of this federation, and in the struggle with Europe she will work out a solution of the Slav problem and therewith of the European problem and the problem of humanity at large. It is true that the Slavs are pacific by nature (Danilevskii is an opponent of Darwinism!), but the struggle with Europe is nevertheless essential and will be none the less salutary.

The concept of the types of civilisation is sufficiently clarified by Danilevskii. His ideas contain a somewhat mechanical association between the zoological notion of race and the historical notion of nationality. This enables him to identity race with church and religion, and in the process he annexes for the Slavic type, not only the Orthodox Rumanians and Greeks, but also the Protestant and Catholic Magyars.