Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/87

Rh not by beating the big moral drum, but by the diffusion of live ideas, so that the Russian brain might at length set to work.

This latter task must be initiated with extreme caution. The work must be rightly chosen and rightly assigned; it must be of such a nature that it will be of real use to society. Pisarev considered that a guarantee for the correct solution of the problem was found in this, that his contemporaries were at length beginning to realise the necessity of employing their intellectual powers. "The economics of mental forces consists wholly in strict and consistent realism."

From the standpoint of ethical utilitarianism, in the sense of a reasonable and deliberate hedonism, Pisarev approves Bazarov, and expounds Turgenev's novel in order to refute the objections levelled against Bazarov.

Social or general advantage is to be found in universal human solidarity; with hand and head the realist must work to establish this solidarity on a firm foundation. "The realist is the thoughtful worker, the man who loves his work." (Turgenev's Bazarov looks upon nature as a workshop!) The realist is a practical thinker and a practical worker, he will therefore take due care concerning the way in which he is to work for the community in accordance with the principle of solidarity, and how under the conditions that are quite peculiar to Russia he is to work for Russia whilst simultaneously working for the wider world community. All work, all practice, is based upon knowledge; Russia needs knowledge, needs science. Pisarev distinguishes the natural sciences, those in which research for the new is undertaken, from such sciences as history and economics (he is thinking here not of Černyševskii but of Kirěevskii!) which confine themselves to a calm analysis of human social relationships. To Pisarev, science is merely the energy which is competent "independently of historical events," to awaken public opinion and to educate the thoughtful leaders of the national work. This liberating science takes for Pisarev the form of natural science, and he rejects history ("Macaulayism"). He therefore demands of the literary critics that they shall become students of natural science. He is dissatisfied with Bělinskii, whose thought was too much confined to the aesthetic field, and who ought to have studied natural science. Lermontov's Pečorin, the type of an earlier