Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/387

Rh as a God, and by degrees only did he come to recognise the nature of this god. He came to recognise that we are not concerned with every reality (his friend Stankevič had warned him, quite needlessly, that these doctrines are not meant to apply to the realities of commonplace life), but with the objective reign of law manifest in and revealed by the succession of phenomena, that reign of law which in social life he recognised as the realisation of humanity.

Feuerbach showed the Russians, who were wholly objectivist, how to harmonise objectivism with subjectivism. Whilst Bělinskii, as he admits, had hitherto considered subjectivism and objectivism only in their more extreme and radical aspects, he now learned from Feuerbach that a logical and methodical peace could be made between moderate subjectivism and moderate objectivism, learned, indeed, that such a peace offered the only possibility of understanding the essential nature of philosophical development and above all of German philosophy, and that it offered the sole means of bringing that development to its proper conclusion. Feuerbach made of man the only goal and issue of human experience, and to Bělinskii, stimulated by Fichte. he displayed the boundary line between ultra-subjectivist illusion and objectivistically true and rational reality.

Whereas Bělinskii had conceived the ideas of God, tsar, hero, and nation, as a complex unity, Feuerbach had shown him the fallacious character of this fusion, and with Herzen and Ogarev he had become an opponent of theocratic theism and tsarism. The anthropomorphic God having been deposed from his heavenly throne as unreal, it naturally followed that the divinely appointed earthly throne of the tsar fell with it, whilst the president, previously no more than "respectworthy," was now raised to the rank of "sanctity."

For the Hegelian left of Russia, Feuerbach's anthropologism and his explanation of religion as anthropomorphism were now reinforced by Strauss. Bělinskii had learned from Strauss to take an adverse view of Christianity and Christ. Vogt and the whole materialistic current fortified him and his intellectual colleagues in their materialist views.

Bělinskii now preached humanity quite in the sense of Feuerbach. But "man," he said, was identical with "liberal," and by liberalism he understood freedom from the oppression of Nicholas. Bělinskii modified the Hegelian program. France