Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/421

Rh those who are impressed by Catholicism, and that this is why he adopted the Catholic view concerning the negativity of Protestantism, a view expressed by Comte and also by de Maistre. Herzen is too ready to identify Protestantism with German science and philosophy and with liberalism. Like Comte, he makes no distinction between theology and religion.

N boyhood Herzen was already a Voltairian, but Voltaire did not preserve him from romanticism and mysticism. Nevertheless Herzen moved on speedily and with comparative ease from mysticism to Hegelianism and the Hegelian left. After he had become intimately acquainted with French and English positivism it was his persistent endeavour to follow the positivist trail, but he found more difficulty in doing so than he was himself perhaps aware.

Herzen's own characterisation of his transition from romanticism and mysticism to positive science is that from the first, as mystic, he was a mystic of science, meaning to imply that, whilst the object of his belief had been transformed, there had been no change in the belief itself—no such change as that with which he reproaches the revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie. He assigns to this phase the entire period of his "mystical" belief in the revolution. Herzen then believed in mankind, in socialist utopias, and so on. But, he asked himself, Is not such a belief ridiculous and stupid, if it be ridiculous and stupid to believe in God and in the kingdom of heaven?

To Herzen, positivism, scientific sobriety, seem always to have come as the "bitter" fruits of philosophical struggle, to have been felt as "a heavy cross." In the first years of his Feuerbachian period (1843), he writes of the "dreadful vampire," of the "coldness" of positive science, and uses many similar expressions which are employed also by German and French romanticists, and indeed by the founder of positivism himself. Herzen knew that positivism must be gained through struggle; he knew that the vigorous thinker must, as Jesus phrased it, lose his soul in order to find it; he must fight through the stages of scepticism ("moral suicide") and of dull, purely negative atheism. Amid all his strivings for positivism the wish frequently recurs, If I could only pray!