Page:The Slavs among the nations by T G Masaryk.djvu/25

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THE SLAVS AMONG THE NATIONS.
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the whole Czech people. The idealistic theories of Kollar and the efforts of those who wished to replace national individuality by vague Panslavic conceptions have had no durable influence. For the Southern Slavs the typical representative of national ideas is Obradoviç, that Serbian monk who travelled over the whole of Western Europe to gain enlightenment and to educate his compatriots: a monk who recognised that the book is worth more than the bell, and that the instruction of children is a more honourable profession than that of archimandrite. Obradovic earnestly desired the union and the liberation of his dismembered nation, but he also demanded the independence of the oppressed Greeks. His principal idea, humanitarian and civilising, consisted, above all, in the enlargement and deepening of scientific knowledge and the establishment of rules of life in accordance with the teaching of reason. (“Counsels of a Sound Reason” is the title of one of his books published in 1784.)

Polish thinkers felt much more than the Czechs and the Southern Slavs their recent loss of political liberty, and their writers are chiefly