Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/468

442 to secure compromise is nothing but stupidity or lack of principle. The able and moral man is one who gives him up whole-heartedly to the spirit of the time and is permeated by that spirit.

The compromisers, like the democrats, recognise the totality of the contrast between positive and negative, but they desire to rob this contrast of its mobility, its life, its soul, for the vitality of the contrast is something essentially practical in its nature, and is therefore unendurable by their impotent demi-souls. To the positivists, too, they wish to forbid the negation of the negative. They would like to preserve the decayed and withered remnants of tradition, and to live with the positivists in these traditional ruins, in this irrational rococo world. They would like to make themselves permanently at home in the positivists' world; in a world where not reason but long continuance and immobility are the measure of the true and the sacred; in a world where China with its mandarins and floggings with the bamboo are the incorporation of absolute truth. But since the negativists gather strength daily, the compromisers desire to weaken the negativist movement by urging the positivists to make a little room for the negativists in their society, by casting out of the positivist historical museum a small number of "ruins which are indeed quite venerable, but have after all fallen utterly into decay." They endeavour to persuade the positivists that the negativists are merely young people who have been embittered by poverty, whose behaviour will be quiet and modest as soon as they are permitted to enter the respectable society of the positivists. In like manner do the compromisers attempt to appease the negativists. They recognise the nobility of the negativists' aims and admire their youthful enthusiasm for purity of principle. But pure principles, they say, cannot be applied in practical life, where an element of eclecticism is in place. We must give way to the world if we are to influence the world

The upshot of this impossible superficial compromise is that the compromisers are despised by both parties.

Bakunin refuses to accept the suggestion that the compromisers serve the cause of progress, whereas the negativists desire to shatter the world to bits. The attempts of the compromisers to effect progress by gradations do not secure progress, but result in the maintenance of the mean and pitiful