Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/435

409 Positivist disillusionment has now destroyed for Herzen, not religion alone, but likewise faith in the meaning of history. Abandoning theology, Herzen abandons also teleology, and in especial the teleology of historical development. He does not believe that progress occurs, even though he admits that man can grow better, accepting this as a simple fact of observation. The reasons why man grows better may doubtless be analysed, but no ultimate aim towards which human improvement tends is discernible. History is a record of the brute understanding of the masses, sanctified irrationality, religious mania. The power and the glory of history are not found in reason, not yet in happiness (as the old song says), but in irrationality. As late as 1867 Herzen reiterates in this fashion his views of 1850, putting them into the mouth of an anatomist named Leviathanskii. The name, of course, derives from Leviathan, for Herzen finds in Hobbes the climax of materialism. The name is likewise intended to suggest that history, the social organism in general, must be looked upon as a monster. In 1864 he refers to history as a disorderly improvisation, and this is his enduring conviction: For Herzen there exist only individual moments weighty with meaning, but no history. He does not admit historical evolution as a whole. His style, his characteristic dazzling aphoristic style, is itself an expression of this conviction.

We trace in Herzen two distinct thought sequences. Sometimes individuality and its "sacredness" (1847) are so vigorously stressed, that society and its development recede into the background, or even disappear from our ken. Individuality must not be made into a means for a remote end; it is an end in itself; it does not subserve any "Moloch," any historico-philosophical artifact. Like Bělinskii he discerns in the misery and in the death of a single human being, no less irrationality and disharmony than in the misery and destruction of the entire human race by some cosmic catastrophe. He admits that the future holds out numerous possibilities, but he declines to accept the theory that there is a predestined path, discoverable in advance, for this would infringe the freedom of individuality. Again and again he expresses his dissent from fatalism.

Herzen adduces an additional argument, rejecting the distant goal in the name of the present. "The present is the true sphere of existence," he wrote as early as 1842, and he