Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/359

Rh transformation of slavophilism to become a nationalist political system which was not conservative merely but positively reactionary. The slavophil philosophy of history was replaced by political Slavism, the slavophil philosophy of religion by the ecclesiastical policy of the synod. For the inadequate but noteworthy philosophical essays of a Kirěevskii and a Homjakov were substituted political tracts and unmethodical disquisitions voicing an academic Slavisticism pursued for political ends, a doctrine which continues to drag out a pitiful existence even to-day.

Some of the slavophil professors have doubtless written important historical and Slavistic works, but no philosophical successor to Kirěevskii has ever appeared.

The influence of slavophil teaching was great and persistent, affecting not merely the prevalent philosophic view of Russian civilisation and history and the intellectual valuation of these, but inducing likewise a mood of enthusiasm, which is attributable to the personal influence exercised by the founders of slavophilism—for Kirěevskii, Konstantin Aksakov, and Homjakov were estimable and amiable men. In multifold transformations, the general thesis and certain individual slavophil doctrines are held by many to-day, whilst slavophilism continues to work also by contraries, through the opposition it arouses. In Miljukov's view the development of slavophilism has been a decadence rather than a simple transformation, for he considers that the philosophical and nationalist elements of the doctrine, those which were united into an integral whole by the founders of the system, have become segregated to undergo independent development. This independent and one-sided development is seen according to Miljukov in Leont'ev the ultranationalist and Solov'ev the philosopher, but it was, he says,