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Rh bach and Comte lead him astray, lead him to the old fallacy to which Hume had succumbed, the identification of religion with anthropomorphism and superstition. The struggle against official church doctrine and official religion perpetuates this fallacy even to-day, and it is therefore easy to understand why Bělinskii and his contemporaries were prone to it.

Bělinskii failed to undertake a thorough and systematic discussion of the basic problems of philosophy, and failed especially to discuss the epistemological problem, for in the reign of Nicholas he was more concerned with practice than with theory. He was content to make the most of the practical and ethical tendency of German philosophy, deriving from that philosophy his general epistemological outlook. He was mainly busied with questions of the day as shown forth in literature. He was not a philosopher in the German sense, not a professor of philosophy; the Germans with their thoroughness and their elaborate systematisations seemed to him unduly philistine. He reproached Gončarov with being a German and a philistine. He esteemed the Germans as "the seminarists of mankind"; but he frankly declared that a successful coup against Bulgarin and Greč gave him more pleasure than an article weighty with detail. He was, in fact, a literary revolutionist, and Gončarov spoke of him as a "tribune."

Bělinskii had an almost morbid thirst for knowledge. "Learn, learn, learn!" was his earliest watchword, and one to which he remained true throughout life. Most of his critiques were in fact written for self-instruction, and this is why they exercised so lively an influence. His opponents were not slow to reproach him as a callow student, to censure him for defective culture, and the reproach was again and again reiterated. It is true that in literature Bělinskii was a self-made man, but so were many of the most talented authors of his day.

Bělinskii was aware of his own defects, but he had a fine intelligence. With the aid of German philosophy he grasped clearly enough the nature of Russia's essential defects, and ardently throughout life did he strive to mend them ("the vehement Vissarion"). He was but thirty-seven when he died. Had his life been prolonged he might have written one or more books for which he cherished plans, but his work as it was was more important to his contemporaries than that of many who have lived an orderly literary career. Nor must Rh