Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/585

Rh create, I say. We are not looking for a reconciliation between science and ecclesiastical religion; our aim is the creation of a new religious and spiritual content for life. Comte's idea, the view of those liberals, socialists, and anarchists who are hostile to religion, that the modern epoch constitutes a higher non-religious stage of development, is erroneous. I have already insisted that evolutionism itself demands the further development, not only of science, but also of religion and of all the forces of the mind. The Russian philosophers of history and philosophers of religion confused myth, confused uncritical credulity and mysticism, with the religious spirit; they confused theocratic ecclesiastical religion with religion itself.

ROM this outlook, too, I consider the problem of the independence and the originality of the Russians. It is the general view that Russians differ from Europeans; but we have to remember that the French and the Italians differ from the English; and we have to ask what precisely are the genuine and true characteristics of the Russians and of the Europeans respectively, and how much independence and originality is possessed by the other peoples.

We have examined with critical care the available explanations and estimates of Russian distinctiveness, and we have considered the ways in which Russians and Europeans have been contrasted. In many cases the judgments are extremely sketchy. Sociology and history have still much to do in this domain. It can hardly be said, for example, that Roman and Greek cultural influences affecting the Gauls, the Teutons, the southern Slavs, and so on, have as yet been precisely and critically determined. What, again, was original in the Greeks and the Romans? Has the originality of the French, the English, the Germans, etc., been objectively established?

To solve this problem it would be necessary to effect a philosophico-historical revision of history.

The influence of Europe upon Russia has incontestably been great, yet while this influence has been at work Russia has undergone a development no less independent than that of the various western nations, and we must not forget this spontaneity. Regarding the Russia of the earliest times, we