Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/557

Rh Psychologically and logically, glaring oppositions exist (the so-called contrast effects), and to this extent the Hegelian dialectic is justified. We may admit that, objectively considered, the contrasts are less glaring than they seem to those who know them subjectively. Revolution may be accounted an exceptional happening; we may wish that there were no revolutions, that development could take place without such shocks. But revolutions have occurred, and it is undeniable that since the great revolution, revolutionism, the revolutionary mood, has become widespread and enduring. Socialism and anarchism as mass moods are definitely revolutionary. In philosophy, literature, and art, and also in the moral domain, revolutionary sentiment is general. Socio-political revolutions are intimately connected with revolutions in the mind. We may recall Čaadaev's saying that in the west revolutions have at first always been mental; "interests" have followed ideas.

Modern revolutionism has developed since the reformation and the renaissance. The religious and ecclesiastical reformation was revolutionary, and led by a natural development to the social and political transformation of Europe. The peoples which accepted and carried through the reformation subsequently exhibited a socio-political trend in the direction of democracy, so that among them the manifestations of revolutionism were less radical than these proved among the Catholic peoples, those that suppressed the reformation and for that very reason again and again broke into revolution against theocratic absolutism. The French revolution was the natural outcome of theocratic absolutism, against which the enlightenment and modern philosophy, fertilised by English and American ideas, directed their shafts. Diderot gave distinctive utterance to the mood of revolutionary Frenchmen when he expressed the wish that the last king might be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Protestantism was comparatively favourable to modern ideas, to philosophy and science. Among the Protestant peoples, therefore, the revolution was less radical, and was predominantly theoretical, literary, and philosophical.

We must refer once more to Hume and Kant, and above all to the Kantian criticism. As we have more than once had occasion to insist, the world-wide historical significance of critical philosophy, as contrasted with uncritical mythology, is that the former effectively destroys the theoretical founda-