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Rh especial upon the doctrines of Schelling and Hegel, but it exercised little influence upon Russian philosophy of history. The Polish problem was formulated in a number of notable historico-philosophical and literary works, and it would be of great interest to undertake a comparative study of these in relation to the other historico-philosophical systems of the Slavs. After the revolution of 1830 the messianism founded previously by Wronski (1778–1853) acquired a definitely political trend in the hands of Mickiewicz, who at a later date contended that upon a Catholic basis and with the help of Napoleon III, Poland would bring salvation to humanity and to herself. His program was at first political, and deliberately militarist, but subsequently assumed a more distinctively social form. Krasinskii recommended inward and spiritual reforms to his fellow-countrymen who had been dispersed by emigration. Whilst Mickiewicz had summarised his revolutionary program in the words, "The slave's only weapon is treason," Krasinskii endeavoured to supersede revolutionism by religious development. In contrast with Russian Orthodoxy and German Protestantism, Catholicism was idealised by the Polish messianists, who conceived it just as mystically as the Russian messianists conceived the idealised Orthodoxy of their own land. This mysticism was reduced to a system by Towianski (1799-1878), a writer who exercised much influence upon Mickiewicz and others.

Among the Poles, too, at the opening of the nineteenth century, the Slavistic movement called a learned panslavism into life. In 1816, in the kingdom of Poland, the Polish government ordered that lectures upon the kindred Slav tongues should be delivered at the Polish universities of Warsaw and Vilna, the aim being to promote the progress of the Polish cause.

Among the Poles panslavism has always taken a more abstract form than among the Czechs, the southern Slavs, and the Ruthenians. Only among the Poles and the Russians did the messianist idea gain ground—only among the two greatest Slav nations, the latter of which had always been independent whilst in the case of the former memories of independence were still fresh. There was, however, a notable distinction between Russian and Polish messianism. The Poles desired to secure the salvation of mankind with the aid and practically under the leadership of the French, who Rh