Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/427

Rh Herzen discovered the last word in German philosophy, and for him this was the last word of philosophy in general, for Herzen prized German philosophy as the non plus ultra of the new thought. Herzen could not conceive of any progress to be made by philosophy beyond Hegel, and he declared that the Hegelian left, including Feuerbach. had produced nothing really new, but had merely brought to light what existed already in Hegel in an undeveloped state.

The history of German philosophy from Kant by way of Fichte to Schelling was compared by Herzen (who in this followed Edgar Quinet) with the political development which is typified in the corresponding names of Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Napoleon. Hegel, he said, was the first to discover the true standpoint, with his abolition of the dualism of objectivism and subjectivism. Herzen passed the same judgment as Bělinskii and Bakunin upon extremist, one-sidedly epistemological and metaphysical subjectivism (Robespierre). It contained an element of intolerable impudence; it was arrogant and ruthless in its criticism; owing to its one-sidedness it could just as little attain to truth as the opposed doctrine, one-sided objectivism (Napoleon)—or as Herzen, following the terminology of the German schools, preferred to call it, one-sided empiricism. Herzen's formula was that empiricism must combine with rationalism.

From the ethical outlook, too, Herzen rejected extreme subjectivism and individualism as egoism. When he first passed under the influence of Feuerbach, he employed the latter's terminology, contrasting mankind with the tu, contrasting the heart as individual with the general, contrasting the individual with the species, and allotting equal rights to both. In Who is to Blame? the individual was contrasted with the family. After Herzen became acquainted with the work of Stirner, individualism was more definitely conceived by him as egoism. Man, he said, is endowed both with natural egoism or individualism and with sociability or the social instinct—this is the best translation of the term employed somewhat vaguely by Herzen, obščestvennost'. Not infrequently he uses the word altruism, which he takes from the French. Often enough these two natural qualities of mankind are referred to; it is recognised that both have their place; and sometimes egoism is expressly defended. "The Slav," he says, "is less egoist than any others." Why, asks Herzen, should Rh