Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/434

408 sophical studentship and philosophical errantry. He was then eight-and-thirty years of age, and his work at this period may serve as the starting-point for an analysis of his sociological ideas. All the more is this the case seeing that when he was a student of Hegel he had made a methodical attempt to secure a precise outlook upon history and the natural sciences and upon knowledge in its widest sense.

His diary dealing with the years 1842 to 1845 tells us how he busied himself with the problem of the nature of knowledge and of science, building mainly upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian foundations. To the same period belong certain essays, Dilettantism in Science and Letters Concerning the Study of Nature, wherein he attempted to formulate his views. He did not in these essays arrive at satisfactory results, and we note in them that no reconciliation is achieved between Hegel and positivist materialism. According to Hegel, in history as in the world at large reason is supreme. Herzen does not yet deny this, but he contrasts logic with history, pointing to the logical characteristics of the former and to the essentially human characteristics of the latter. Herzen distinguishes historical thought as an activity of the species from the logical thought of the individual, which is, he says, thought properly speaking. In the positivist sense, Herzen lays especial stress upon the exact thought of natural science, and we already find him voicing complaints concerning "the heavy cross of disillusioned knowledge." From the outlook of this disillusioned knowledge, which he opposes to all forms and degrees of religious illusion, Herzen fights against dilettantism. Man is at variance with nature and himself, and his only resource therefore is exact knowledge; in his disintegration it is essential that he should attain a clear outlook. Herzen proceeds to attempt a history of philosophy which shall convey a more detailed formulation of this view but he does not give us a clearer statement of principles, and the contrast between Feuerbach and Hegel is not transcended.

In this stage Hegel has still so much influence that Herzen recogniies a progressive movement in history, and admits the possibility of a foreknowledge of the future, writing: "We are the premisses out of which the syllogism of the future is constructed, and we can therefore cognise the future in advance."

Such is the language of Herzen in 1843; but by 1850 all this has been forgotten, and Hegel with it.