Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/357

Rh had advanced a stage, had arrived at a profounder conception of the problem of Russia in relation to Europe, being helped here by German philosophy, and indeed by European thought in its entirety, influenced as that thought was by the sanguinary experiences of the revolution and the counter-revolution and faced as it was with the need for choosing between the old regime and the new. Russia was so far Europeanised and since the days of Peter had been so closely involved in the European system of states, that after the end of the eighteenth century European influence became extremely potent in Russia, and all the more potent because Russia, through her internal development, had to encounter the same difficulties and to solve the same problems as Europe.

From the outlook of the history of literature, slavophilism is a parallel phenomenon with the romanticist restoration in Europe, as manifested in art and above all poesy, in philosophy and theology, in history, in jurisprudence, and in politics. Though slavophilism was an outgrowth of Russian conditions, the movement was none the less in high degree European, and it developed under European influences just as much as did the opposed movement of westernism. Western philosophy furnished the slavophils with arms against westernism. If Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Fourier, and Saint-Simon were Europeans, so also were Schelling, Baader, de Maistre, de Bonald, and Görres.

Slavophilism was the philosophic attempt to renovate theocracy. Philosophically considered, slavophilism was the first deliberately conceived philosophy of religion and philosophy of history.

The scientific weakness of slavophilism depends upon the inadequacy of its foundations, upon the inadequacy of its epistemological criticism. It was impossible to attain to the philosophic goal with the aid of the protean philosophy of Schelling, Hegel, the Hegelian left, and materialism, could not be effectively resisted, and certainly could not be put to rout, by the forces of Schelling and Baader. Still less could this end be secured with the aid of Joannes Damascenus.

The historical and economic foundations and aims of slavophilism are likewise inadequate, though this may in part be condoned by the insufficiencies of Russian historical research in that epoch. It was owing to these insufficiencies that past and present appeared under false illumination, and like