Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

“ The folk trusts tradition, which has not been thought out, but has been made by life itself; history, history alone, not the law of nature, is the desirable and needful authority for mankind. The believing spirit of the genuine Russian, being uncorrupted by logic, accepts this authority as a matter of course; the folk feels directly, feels in its soul, and perceives absolute truth, artist fashion, by way of faith. ”

“ Hence the heroes of freedom and the leading revolutionaries were not the heirs of the revolution, and its fruits were harvested by the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie contented itself with half-measures in religion and politics, with Protestantism and liberalism. Liberalism is the religion of the bourgeois, of the trader, of the man without individuality, of the intermediator between the possessor and the non-possessor. An instrument, a means to an end—such is the bourgeois. ”

“ From God and chaos, Solov'ev evolves the world and its history, evolves them as do all mythagogues, notionally and in their reality.
The sophia strives against chaos; this struggle presupposes a soul, the world-soul, the materia prima, the potential mother of the created world. The creation of the world proceeds from the father; the logos brings forth the higher world of ideas, but these ideas are mere contemplative and impassive beings; from the holy ghost originate the pure spirits or angels, which have feeling and will, and possess a higher order of freedom than man. ”

“ In support of Herzen's and Černyševskii's doctrine that Russia could skip certain stages of European development, we read: "Who can maintain that we must necessarily walk in the footsteps of Europe, in the footsteps of a Saxony, an England, or a France? The Gneists, Bastiats, Mohls, Raus, and Roschers, serve up to us masses of excrement, desiring to make the refuse of dead centuries into laws for the future. Such laws may do for them, but we shall find another law for ourselves. It is not merely that we can find something new, but it is essential that we do so. ”

“ For the anarchists the problem of problems is this. Can the existing unjust social order, established and maintained by force, be forcibly swept away, so that the new order, in which force will be unknown, may take its place? Will the physical-force anarchist, the forcible expropriator, of to-day, be the peaceful brother of to-morrow? Anarchism is opposed on principle to the use of force; is it then permissible for the anarchist to slay and to expropriate; can Beelzebub cast out devils? The philosophic theorists of anarchism do their utmost to establish the right to kill. ”

“ Marxism as a philosophical and sociological system is, after all, itself nothing but ideology, and this ideology has been conceived prior to the practical realisation of communism. Marxist ideology is not a superstructure but a substructure and an anteroom!
Socialism can have no other than an ethical foundation. The European and Russian predecessors of Marx are perfectly right here. Criticism, science, does not do away with the motivation of actions or with the formulation of aims; utopianism is not rooted in morality, but in inadequate criticism and in the lack of scientific grasp. ”

“ But George suddenly decides that he will have nothing to do with the matter, that he does not wish to kill. "Why kill?" he asks. The emissary, probably a man who has spent his days in prison or in Siberia, seems to him only an old fellow in his dotage. "He looked anxiously at me and stroked my hand affectionately like a father. But I knew for certain: I was not with him, nor with Vanja, nor with Erna. I was with no one." He decides that he will cease to live. Memories of childhood and of his mother's love cannot teach him to love his fellow men. The world has become accursed to him. ”

“ It is true that genuine self-sacrifice is a rarity. Such sacrifice is as a rule purely imaginary. But it exists. There is such a thing as self-sacrifice utterly devoid of egoism and utterly free from the spirit of mercenary calculation. This is where Černyševskii errs; there are feelings and impulses of a quite unegoistic order; and Černyševskii simply does not understand—himself! But from the days of Aristippus and Epicurus down to those of Bentham and Mill the same mistake has been made by more than one philosopher, by more than one of the best and noblest among mankind. ”

“ As a party, the democratic party is not the general, but merely a particular; it is the negative contrasted with the other particular, the positive. The whole significance and the irresistible energy of the negative are found in the destruction of the positive; but in destroying the positive, the negative, too, perishes. Since democracy does not yet exist in its affirmative wealth, but only as an incomplete negative, it must first perish with its opponent, before it can rise renewed in all the fulness of life. ”

“ In the course of my late visit to Russia and Siberia I made the personal acquaintance of more than five hundred men and women who were regarded by the Russian secret police as 'Nihilists.' Some were still at liberty in European Russia, some were in exile in Siberia, and some were in penal servitude at the mines of Kara. Among them all, I did not find a single human being who could be called, by any stretch or licence of language, an Anarchist, nor did I find a single human being who would have approved—still less encouraged—such crimes as those recently committed in Paris and Barcelona. ”

“ The effort to secure compromise is nothing but stupidity or lack of principle. The able and moral man is one who gives him up whole-heartedly to the spirit of the time and is permeated by that spirit.
The compromisers, like the democrats, recognise the totality of the contrast between positive and negative, but they desire to rob this contrast of its mobility, its life, its soul, for the vitality of the contrast is something essentially practical in its nature, and is therefore unendurable by their impotent demi-souls. To the positivists, too, they wish to forbid the negation of the negative. ”

“ Here we touch the difficult tasks which modern philosophy, as a scientific outlook upon the universe and upon life, has to effect amidst the enlarging spheres of scientific specialisation. The problem of the correct division of labour in scientific matters is but a part of the general social problem of the division of labour.
In contradistinction to theology, science is knowledge of men and for men—not the knowledge of God and for God. For science, man is the measure of all things, man is the true and ultimate object of all research. ”

“ Since the days of Bělinskii and Herzen, for Russian thinkers the ethical problem of revolution has been the question whether crime and murder are permissible. Ropšin became aware that as a revolutionary he had not merely to sacrifice his own life, but to slay others, and he asked himself, May one kill? Such is the real problem of conscience, and the question can only be answered in the negative. Man cannot play the part of God towards his fellows. In accordance with humanitarian ethics, all human life without distinction is sacred. ”

“ Socialism will conquer, but will do so in utterly foolish forms. In the struggle between the revolution and "order," Europe will be transformed until it comes to resemble Bohemia after the Hussite wars; civilisation will take flight to England, or more probably to America, where the new social order is already flourishing. But the new order will be driven out by a yet newer order, the minority will once again revolt—the flux and reflux of history. ”

“ Mihailovskii draws a sharp distinction between religion and mysticism, considering them to be fundamental opposites. Mysticism translates man from natural reality into a cloudy indefinite remoteness, into regions where the fantastic gods of the mythologies play their senseless parts; religion, on the other hand, connects man with the realities of life, and makes him responsible for his actions. Belief and knowledge may be dead, may be incapable of leading to action. Religion is the harmony of belief and knowledge with man's ethical ideals, and is the impulse to action in a definite direction. ”

“ Inspired with full confidence in ourselves, in our energies, in popular sympathy, in the splendid future of Russia, predestined to be the first of all countries to realise socialism, we shall sound the clarion call, 'Seize your axes.' Then we shall strike down the members of the tsarist party, shall strike them unpityingly as they have unpityingly struck us, shall hew them down in the squares should the rout venture forth into the open, hew them down in their dwellings, in the narrow alleys of the towns, in the wide streets of the capitals, in the villages and the hamlets. ”

“ Homjakov saw in Christ the head of the church, but to Leont'ev the head was the tsar. Religion became politics; yet again and again the strong individuality of the man who wished to believe but could not believe rose in rebellion against the God-tsar. He would like to take courage, and to cast down the terrible god from his throne, but energy fails, and his tortured soul longs for eternal peace. The world, mundane life, vanishes before the image of eternity. Life seems so null, man seems so powerless, that Leont'ev has no need of morality ”

“ Not infrequently the Russian revolutionist became utterly indifferent to life; he grew accustomed to the dangers, the death risks, to which his friends were exposed, and in the end his own death seemed to him nothing more than a means cowards a revolutionary end. He took to heart the saying of Mihailov: "In truth it is no whit easier to die in a room than to die on the battlefield!" ”

“ If he cannot change his nature or his habits, it is his duty to offer up his life. The sense of honour is the awareness of needlessly endured affronts and constraints, and this therefore demands, not self-sacrifice, but space for all the energies and ideals that have hitherto been repressed. If, from the pressure of circumstances, this space, this satisfaction, cannot be secured, the man whose sense of honour has been awakened is in this case too impelled to sacrifice his life. Mihailovskii is aware that this rigorous demand will not always be fulfilled ”

“ In 1841 Bělinskii went over to the French socialists. George Sand was rehabilitated, for the woman's question had always seemed of great importance to him. He desired for women equality of position with men and an identical education; marriage was to be free from conventional contracts, and was to secure its moral value as a true union of love. Saint-Simon and Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Cabet, Proudhon, and Ledru-Rollin, instilled into him the conviction that socialism was "the idea of ideas, the being of beings, the question of questions, the alpha and omega of belief and knowledge" ”

“ Hitherto the revolutions have been mere Don Quixotisms, the republics nothing but forms of the old regime, which must be destroyed from its foundations if the revolution is to have any real meaning. The sentiments of the European masses remain monarchical and Christian, and, pending the destruction of authoritarianism and religion, political scene-shifting is devoid of significance. A true revolution to-day must be socialist, atheist, and materialist. While the masses, while the revolutionaries themselves, are still Christian believers, bourgeois revolts terminate in cæsarism. ”

“ Amid the rapid decay of religious and civil institutions in Europe, amid the widespread diffusion of revolutionary ideas, it becomes our duty to establish the foundations of the fatherland so firmly that they cannot be shaken. We must find a basis from which right conduct can spring; we must discover energies which will develop the distinctive characteristics of Russia, and will ultimately enable our country to assemble the sacred heritage of nationality into a compact whole, to which we must anchor our salvation. ”