Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/451

Rh of his philosophy, and that he uncritically continued to cling to Feuerbach and positivism. Marx and Engels advanced beyond Feuerbach, and even Stirner attempted to do so. At the outset Herzen passes on from Feuerbach upon the line of Marx towards revolution; he advances to crime in Byronic fashion; but after remaining long content with breathing threatenings and slaughter, after prolonged "hesitation," he turns away to liberalism.

Now I, too, believe that Feuerbach's philosophy is defective. The identification of religion with myth is fallacious, and Feuerbach's materialism is of as little avail as materialism in general. Marx prudently transmuted it into economic materialism. Herzen deduced the political consequences of the Feuerbachian doctrine "homo homini deus"; but he remained too much on the abstract plane; he failed to undertake a precise analysis of the real relationships between religion and politics, between church and state; and he failed to secure any profounder insight into the nature of theocracy and into its development and forms.

To the last, Herzen remained an opponent of Orthodoxy, and yet he concluded a peace with the believing mužik and the old believers, to find the positively Russian in his folk-duma.

It was a grave defect. too, that Herzen failed to secure a better understanding of socialism, its true signifiance and its internal and external development. I am aware that it is by no means easy to arrive at clear views from a study of the writings of the French socialists. I admit, moreover, that the practical demands of these socialists were not such as most of us would consider practical (the Saint-Simonians, for example, wished to have all their clothing to button behind, so that it would be impossible for the individual to dress himself unaided, and his neighbour would be compelled to exercise the faculty of altruism!). But it was a weakness in Herzen that he failed to study Marx, that he did not observe the labour movement and the economic and social developments of his day, and that he did not grasp the influence that these changes were exercising in the political field.

Nor were Herzen's views of the mužik and the mir based upon close investigation of economic and social relationships. He says with justice of the slavophils that their holy-picture ideals and the fumes of incense made it impossible for them to