Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/436

410 presented life in general, or life in the present, as man's one and only true goal He seemed to overlook the fact that the present, too, is history, even though it be history in its most recent manifestation.

Herzen, like Bělinskii, is an adversary of historism; he refuses, like Bělinskii, to be the slave of time and events.

Subsequently, as we have seen, Herzen admits that there is progress, but even then his materialist outlook distinguishes him from Hegel. In materialism Herzen finds support for his vigorous individualism. Definite and thoroughly individual brains will, he says, have nothing to do with pantheism or with any organisation of these brains which makes them no more than parts of a whole. Brain monads, but no pre-established harmony—thus we may summarise Herzen's metaphysics.

When I thus emphasise Herzen's materialism, I must not be taken as implying that he failed to recognise thought as the motive force for individual men and the motive force of history. But Herzen explains thought materialistically as brain activity. From this outlook he sometimes hopes that progress will be secured by an improvement in brains. Reforms, social and historical reforms, are the outcome of changes in "cerebrin." He is doubtless speaking ironically here, as also when he compares human progress with the progress of the cattle which man himself has tamed; and yet this very irony is the sequel of the positivist and materialist process of disillusionment, of the struggle of knowledge against religious mania and sanctified irrationality.

HE developments subsequent to 1850 led Herzen away from his historical nihilism.

The Crimean war gave a powerful stimulus to political interest in Russia. Sevastopol and its consequences, the new regime and its preparations for reform (in especial for the liberation of the peasantry), attracted much attention from Herzen; the consideration of practical political possibilities compelled him to take up a position in relation to precisely defined aims and to co-operate for their attainment. Hence, although a refugee, Herzen came to live with and in Russia, and he discovered that for this Russia which he had been so glad to leave he felt a strong and saving love. The importance