Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/470

444 Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer are preaching negation anew they find listeners and followers everywhere, even among the positivists.

Mankind can secure satisfaction and repose in no other way than by the adoption of a universally practical principle, on which comprehends within itself the thousandfold phenomena of the mental life. But where is this life-creating principle to be discovered? Is it in Protestantism? Protestantism is given up to the most deplorable anarchy, and is split into innumerable sects; the Protestant world has no enthusiasm, and is the most disillusioned world imaginable. Is it in Catholicism? Catholicism, once a world-controlling power, has become the obedient tool of an immoral policy foreign to itself. Is it in the state? The state is affected by a profound internal conflict, for the state is impossible without religion, without a vigorous and universal sentiment. Neither Protestantism, nor Catholicism, nor yet the state, is the comprehensive, tranquillising, satisfying principle.

In conclusion, Bakunin once more apostrophises the compromisers in the following terms: "Look within, gentlemen, and tell me honestly whether you are content with yourselves, and whether you possibly can be content with yourselves. Are you not without exception gloomy and paltry manifestations of a gloomy and paltry age? Are you not full of contradictions? Are you complete men? Do you believe in anything real? Do you know what you want, and indeed are you capable of wanting anything? Has modern reflection (introspection), this epidemic malady of our day, left any part of you truly alive; are you not utterly permeated by this malady, paralysed by it, and broken? In fact, gentlemen, you must admit that our epoch is a gloomy epoch, and that we, its children, are yet more gloomy."

Bakunin's hope is therefore fixed upon the spirit of revolution, which will speedily manifest itself and will soon hold its assize. On all hands, and especially in France and England, socialistic—religious unions are coming into being. The people, whose rights are recognised in theory, but who by birth and circumstance are condemned to poverty and ignorance, and therewith also to practical slavery, the people, comprising the great majority of mankind, begin to number the thin ranks of their enemies and to demand the realisation of the rights which have already been theoretically conceded. All nations