Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/225

Rh true basis for a genuinely Russian political system. The relationship between Russia and Europe resembled that between day and night, between light and darkness, between Ormuzd and Ahriman; Russia was social order, Europe was anarchy; Russia was life, Europe death, the death of the individual and of the nation as a whole, death at once moral and physical.

Finally, though with a gross distortion of the slavophil philosophy of history, Pobědonoscev considered that the essential malady of Europe and of liberalism (including Russian liberalism under Alexander II) was rationalism. The meaning he attached to this term varied. Sometimes he attacked logic and the syllogistic method; sometimes he censured logical formalism or animadverted upon the critical movement in literature. In contrast with these things he extolled life and its immediate needs, placing all his confidence in immediate sensation, in warm feeling, and in experience. Quite after the manner of so many ultra-moderns, did he thus display Rousseauist views. For Pobědonoscev, too, had studied in the school of Rousseau, and like so many of the romanticists he rejected science, philosophy, and civilisation. He did not, however, aim at the return to a state of nature, but at returning to the prepetrine third Rome with its Byzantine orthodoxy and its philosophy of the fathers of the church. This philosophy is mystical, and utterly without rationalism. Pobědonoscev accepted in its entirety the mystical psychology of the slavophils, but as a practical statesman and ecclesiastic he carried it out to its logical political consequences. Thus the mystical imitator of Christ (Pobědonoscev translated à Kempis) developed into the "grand inquisitor" of Dostoevskii.

According to the literal phrasing of this Orthodox Russian theory of cognition, only the blockhead can desire to think clearly about everything. The most valuable ideas, those most needful in life, remain in a mystical chiaroscuro in the remote recesses of the soul. The greatest thoughts are necessarily obscure. The mass of the population is under the sway of a natural vis inertiæ, but this inertia must not be confused with unculture and roughness, for it is a natural and healthy shrinking from logical thought, a natural tendency to shun the hustle of modern progress. The folk trusts tradition, which has not been thought out, but has been made by life itself; history, history alone, not the law of nature, is the desirable and needful authority for mankind. The believing