Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/426

400 in this way or in that and feels himself morally bound so to decide, Herzen attempts to solve by saying that "the development of science, its present state, compels us to accept certain truths, regardless of our desires." This solution was furnished by Herzen in 1845 in the discussion with Granovskii to which reference has previously been made. To the objection that this duty is relative merely, and appears in the end to be not a duty at all but a historical problem, Herzen makes answer that such truths cease to be a historical problem, and become "simple and irrefutable facts of consciousness." When Herzen goes on to compare these "facts" with the theorems of Euclid we must admit that from the epistemological outlook the comparison is unfortunate, but the important point to note is his insistence upon the obligatory character of certain truths. He continually recurs to this view. We have seen that in his essay on Turgenev's Bazarov he maintains the universally obligatory character of those truths which come as an absolute demand of the rigidly scientific understanding. "Barren scepticism," irony, the mood of the Byronic Lucifer, are thus decisively rejected.

N the Byronic mood following the experiences of 1848 Herzen abandoned himself to contempt for his fellows, to the pride of Lucifer in Cain. His mood, indeed, was not one of contempt merely, but positively criminal, nay murderous. Herzen, like Bělinskii and Bakunin before him, was led to the problem of crime by way of idealism.

Faced like Bakunin and Bělinskii with the problem of subjectivism versus objectivism, he decided in favour of a harmonious combination of the two. The evolution of German philosophy, of whose principles he gave an account, strengthened his inclination towards this solution. The work in which it was presented, entitled ''Letters Concerning the. Study of Nature'', was the most detailed of Herzen's philosophical writings, and exercised a formative influence upon the development of Russian philosophy. It was completed in 1865. With Feuerbach, Herzen decided on metaphysical grounds in favour of positivism and materialism, and advocated the bridging over of the crude contrast between subjectivism and objectivism. In Hegel (not in Schelling, not even in Fichte, not in Kant)