Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/472

446 mood of the circle in which he moved, and to a degree therefore to the revolutionary mood of his time. It must further be admitted that he provided a successful interpretation of democracy in its philosophic aspects when he conceived democracy as a general outlook on the universe. In this matter too, Herzen followed in Bakunin's footsteps. In Bakunin's conception of democracy as religious in character we trace the influence of French socialism. Noteworthy are the energetic protests against scepticism and the longing for a saving faith.

We must consider Bakunin's analysis of bourgeois liberalism in this light, and in this light we cannot fail to give it our general approval.

HE programme of religious democracy was transformed by Bakunin into the program of anarchistic pandestruction. He was led along this course, not merely by his multiform personal experiences, which increased his hostility to existing society, but in addition by the development of his philosophical thought. Bakunin accepted Feuerbach's anthropologism in the form of a sharply defined materialism, adhering to Herzen's exposition of its principles in From the Other Shore. Bakunin's tendencies in this direction were reinforced by the influence of Proudhon (owing to his attack upon the church and the state in 1858, in his book De la justice dans la revolution et dans l'église, Proudhon had to flee from Paris), and by that of postrevolutionary and antireactionary materialism. Thus religious democracy became antireligious democracy.

With Herzen, Bakunin now came to conceive the present as a definitive transition from theological illusion to the positivist disillusionment of realistic materialism. In the program for the peace congress at Geneva (1867), antitheology was placed beside federalism and socialism as the third essential demand. After the Lyons disturbances he had one of his recurrent paroxysms of theorising, and wrote the most detailed of his philosophical fragments, Dieu et l'état, which was first published in 1882 by the press of the Jura federation. Ecrasons l'infâme—thus may be summarised his philosophy of religion and philosophy of history as formulated in 1875. ("L'église et l'état sont mes deux bêtes noires.")

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