Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/471

Rh and all men are inspired with a premonition, and every one who is not affected with paralysis looks with tense expectation towards the near future, about to utter the word of deliverance. Even in Russia, which we know so little and for which perchance a great destiny is in store, lowering clouds are gathering, the heralds of storm! The atmosphere is sultry, pregnant with tempests! "To the positivists we say: 'Open the eyes of your mind; let the dead bury their dead; realise at last that the spirit, the ever-young, the ever-reborn, is not to be discovered in mouldering ruins!' To the compromisers we say: 'Throw open your hearts to the truth; clear your minds from pitiful and blind wisdom, free yourselves from the theorist's arrogance and the slave's dread, which have withered your souls and paralysed your movements!' Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which only destroys and annihilates because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The desire for destruction is also a creative desire!"

Immediately after its appearance, Bakunin's essay attracted considerable and favourable attention from the liberal press of Europe and of Russia. Herzen, without knowing who was the author, thought highly of it, for Bakunin had roughed in the outline for Herzen's analysis of the revolution of 1848. Herzen's From the Other Shore was no more than the filling in of this outline with historic content. The abstractness of the exposition is characteristic of Bakunin and his anarchism. Not merely did Bakunin conceive Hegel's dialectical process in a purely schematic manner, but he conceived it unhistorically. According to Hegel the higher historic form develops out of the contrast between thesis and antithesis. Bakunin presents Hegel's formula in a way which indicates that the two contrasts are to be entirely superseded, and to give place to a completely new form. I suspect that Bakunin had already conceived, though not perhaps very clearly, the thought of Russia's messianism. Russia was for Europe the something wholly new, and Europe was perishing from its internal oppositions. Unquestionably when Bakunin spoke of the positive he was thinking of the medieval third and second Rome; and in the struggle between the positive and the negative he presented an accurate schematic representation of the development of the modern age.

Bakunin's article gave clear expression to the revolutionary