Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/574

548 itself elements from the world of science and from modern philosophy.

Feuerbach, in fact, drags the Russian down out of his Orthodox heaven, drags him down to an earth on which the Protestant and the Jew have already long ere this planted their feet. Herzen and Bakunin, like Bělinskii, were at the outset defenders of Christianity; Bakunin, like Granovskii, clung to the idea of immortality, but here too, in the end, agreed that Feuerbach was right; Bělinskii, Herzen, and Bakunin were all adverse to scepticism. In 1847, Bakunin reproached his friend Annenkov, the liberal critic, for being a sceptic; after his removal to Europe, Bakunin asked Herzen whether the latter was still a believer. Throughout life Bakunin himself remained a believer, nay, remained superstitious, remained a mystic, notwithstanding that the influence of Feuerbach and Comte had gone far to convince him that the old mythopoeic and mystical outlooks must be abandoned. The object of his faith was changed, but the old mental trend was still dominant; his belief in democracy was now a religion of whose truth he was profoundly convinced; it seemed to him that there was something inadequate in a system of political ideas untinctured by religion. He gave unambiguous expression to this opinion in his program of 1842, the philippic against the conservatives and the liberals which furnishes us with the clearest light on Bakunin's own philosophical development. Russian anarchists, socialists, liberals, even slavophils, all draw upon the same source of Russian anarchism; to all of them it seems that life in the political field is concerned solely with "externals"; and they all insist upon the need for an "inward" spiritual life. Precisely because they are religiously inclined do they value the extant state so little, and it is only those among them who are indifferent to religious matters (including a considerable proportion of the liberals) that are satisfied with the political and administrative state in its present form.

As an Orthodox Russian, Bakunin, like Herzen, felt throughout life the burden of the theocratic authority; this is why the two men were in revolt against religion, against the church, against theocratic authority in general; hence their detestation of this authority, their hatred of tsar, church, state, of power in all its forms. The revolution against the theocracy, against the extent absolute, filled Bakunin's whole mind, and he desired to replace the false absolute by the true and definite absolute;