Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/467

Rh tiveness, is no longer the positive but the negative. By excluding the negative from itself, it excludes itself from itself, and destroys itself. It follows from this that the positive and the negative do not weigh equally in the scales; the contrast is not an equilibrium, for the negative scale is far more heavily loaded. The negative determines the life of the positive, includes within itself the totality of the contrast, and alone therefore possesses an absolute justification for existence.

This deduction seems to conflict with what was previously conceded by Bakunin, namely that the negative, taken by itself and considered in the abstract, is just as one-sided as the positive. This is indeed so, in so far as the negative excluded from the positive is itself positive. When the positivists negate the negative in its quiescent relationship to itself, they are discharging a logical and even sacred function, though they know not what they do. They believe themselves to be negating the negative, but they are negating it only in so far as they themselves convert it into a positive. They awaken the negative from the philistine repose for which it is ill-suited, and lead it back to its great mission—to the unresting and relentless destruction of all that positively exists.

Bakunin admits that the positive and the negative are equally justified when the latter, quiescently and egoistically withdrawing into itself, is untrue to itself. But the negative must not be egoistic; it must lovingly give itself up to the positive in order to absorb the positive. With growing enthusiasm Bakunin sociomorphises the logical contrast between the positive and the negative. In his relentless negation the negative appears simultaneously as that which is common to the two terms of the contrast, and as the superposed, the superior, the solely justified term; it is the manifestation of the contemporary practical spirit (which until the contrast has thus been resolved remains indiscernible)—the spirit which by its vigorous mission of destruction exhorts to repentance the sinful souls of the compromisers, the spirit which announces its imminent coming, its imminent revelation in a genuinely democratic and universally human church of liberty.

One who understands the spirit of the time and is permeated by that spirit, can wish no other compromise than the self-resolution of the positive by the negative. The effort