Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/510

484 superadded to French, especially that of Hegel and of the radical Hegelian left, that of Feuerbach and Strauss; with Feuerbach came materialism (Vogt, etc.), the positivism of Comte and Mill, and the naturalistic evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer. The Russians, enslaved at home, sought political culture from the liberal and socialist leaders and writers of Europe. Constant, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Owen, and subsequently Lassalle and Marx, furnished the social and political ideals, whilst the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach were a solvent to Byzantine Orthodoxy. To put the matter in a nutshell, Marxist astatist communism was to abolish and replace the medieval agrarian natural economy of theocratic Russia!

Let the reader call to mind Tolstoi's Confession, where that writer describes the revolution that took place within his mind when he learned, as a great novelty, that there was no God. In Europe, generations and centuries had prepared the way for this novelty; medieval philosophy and theocratic organisation had been transformed step by step; and none the less Europe was not everywhere prepared for the innovations. But think of theocratic Russia, enter into the mind of the religiously trained Russian, and realise how there came to him, like a bolt from the blue, the message of Voltaire, Diderot, Comte, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Vogt, Strauss, and Marx. In Europe as early as the thirteenth century the phrase "de tribus impostoribus" could be fathered upon the emperor; and we know that there were infidel popes. But what must have been the effect of the sudden invasion of unbelief in Russia, a land where the church and its monasteries had hitherto been the highest, and indeed the sole generally recognised, spiritual authority, a land where the state formed the right and left arms of this authority? In England, Mill and Darwin were buried in Westminster Abbey; in Russia, such men as Černyševskii, the adherents of Mill and of Darwin, found their way to the penitentiary or to Siberia!

In Europe, too, liberty was dearly bought by revolutions and reformations, and even to-day has not everywhere been secured. Such liberty, the outcome of great intellectual struggles and long-enduring mental labour, can already be partially endured in Europe; but in Russia, the influence of European thought, of European mental life, was perforce