Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/366

340 But this differentiation in Russia between the schools of Hegel and of Schelling was not manifest at the outset, for the first westernisers were, like the slavophils, Schellingians.

Within the westernist movement, the religious and metaphysical question was the cause of a segregation into right and left camps. This segregation occurred on exactly the same lines as in German Hegelianism.

We can follow the matter in Herzen's reminiscences.

From childhood upwards Herzen had been a Voltairian and a freethinker. At the university of Moscow, where he studied natural science and medicine, he was a materialist and an atheist. He tells us that his renewed and profounder study of Hegel led him to this metaphysical and religious outlook. A light broke in on him when he recognised that Hegel was "the algebra of revolution." Whilst his friends were intoxicated with Hegelian scholasticism and were satisfied therewith, Herzen, with Hegel's aid, liberated his mind from all traditional political and religious views. Feuerbach's anthropologism likewise played a notable part in this development. To Herzen, therefore, science in the positivist sense became absolute mistress, whereas many of the liberal westernisers, no less than the slavophils, were moving in the direction of religious romanticism. Herzen detested the expedient of liberal symbolism and allegory, deciding clearly and unambiguously in favour of materialism and atheism, which in his belief were imperiously dictated by science. It was for this reason that in 1846 he definitely broke with many of his friends, and especially with Granovskii. Granovskii desired to leave the religious question open, and himself cherished a belief in personal immortality. Botkin's metaphysical outlook was identical, and Čičerin held similar religious views.

French socialism likewise exercised a decisive influence upon Herzen. Hegel, Feuerbach, and Proudhon were his spiritual leaders. A man, said Herzen, who has not vitally experienced Hegel's Phenomenology and Proudhon's Contradictions cannot be considered a complete, a thoroughly modern ("contemporary") human being. Feuerbach brought enfranchisement from mysticism and mythology. Materialist, positivist, scientific sobriety was to free Young Russia from inherited religious mysticism; the sobriety of science was to disintegrate, dispossess, and replace the ardency of mysticism.

Herzen was followed by Bělinskii; by Ogarev, who inde-