Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/418

392 religion I bequeath you. In that religion there is no paradise, no recompense, outside the individual consciousness, the personal conscience. When the right hour comes make your way homeward to our own people to preach to them this gospel; there men once liked to hear me and perchance will recall my name

"My blessings upon you in the name of human reason, personal liberty, and brotherly love."

DO not know if I shall have succeeded in giving the reader an impression of Herzen's literary art. As far as possible I have employed his own words and have followed his expositions uninterruptedly.

In his analysis of religious illusion we have a charming synthesis of the views of those two philosophers with whom Herzen was best acquainted, Comte and Feuerbach, but there is intermingled here some of Stirner's pitilessly logical desecration. Comte is responsible for Herzen's identification of Christianity with Catholicism, for his depreciation of Protestantism as the negation of Catholicism, for his estimate of metaphysics and for his insistence on the political character of Catholicism. Herzen's setting of the problem, however, is derivable rather from Proudhon, and in part from Saint-Simon. Moreover it was by Čaadaev that Herzen was awakened to the significance of Catholicism. Herzen's first literary efforts, A Young Man's Memoirs and Further Memoirs of a Young Man, written in 1840 and 1841, dealt with Čaadaev's work, and the two writers were on terms of friendship. Herzen's historico-philosophical estimate of civilisation betrays the influence of Rousseau and the French socialists. His description of history as moving in a circle recalls the terminology of Vico, whose views were modified, however, for Herzen by the influence of Carlyle. Herzen owed his inexorable materialism to Vogt, with whom he was personally acquainted, and we recall in this connection the breach with Granovskii owing to Herzen's disbelief in personal immortality. His mood was at times influenced by Schopenhauer and Voltaire, and we have reminiscences of Goethe's Mephistopheles. His views on practical conduct were suggested by Byron's Lucifer.

Herzen has been accused of ecclecticismeclecticism [sic], but the reproach