aware of having any philosophy of religion; he holds fast to his Moleschott or to his Pisarev, and that suffices him.
The nihilist is fundamentally an unbeliever, but he believes in the frog (Pisarev), in the electric cable (Herzen), or in the railway (Bělinskii). The nihilistic atheist and materialist believes in his atheism and materialism; often his belief is no less fanatical and blind than that of his orthodox opponents. The nihilist has merely changed the object of his faith. In infancy and boyhood he had believed in the doctrines of the catechism; in the higher classes of the middle school and at the university he has come to believe in the doctrines of Feuerbach and Moleschott. The nihilistic philosophy of enlightenment is negative, negational; it is not critical; the unbelieving nihilist is a believer, just as the "infidel" Mohammedan becomes a fervent Christian.
This unbelieving belief is typical of Russian philosophical development, as we have had occasion to see in the case of numerous Russian thinkers.
iv. The emphasis laid upon practice led the nihilists to morality. Ethics was the most important nihilistic discipline. The influence of German philosophy was here partially operative, for since the days of Kant that philosophy had preferred the practical reason to the theoretical. Personal motives, too, played their part. Černyševskii and Dobroljubov had had a theological training, whilst Pisarev's home education had been on rigidly moral lines. A determinative influence was exercised by Russian social and political conditions, by the intolerable character of theocratic absolutism, which rendered, a new conduct of life essential. It is true that the nihilists fulminated against morality, but they were referring to the old ecclesiastical morality. Bakunin desired a "new morality," Černyševskii desired "new men."
Hoping to establish ethics upon irrefutable principles and unshakable foundations, Černyševskii and his successors had recourse to egoism and utilitarianism. This system has often been extolled as empirical and practical, and was contrasted by the nihilists with the moral phrasemongering (in fact unpractical) of many so-called idealists.
Just as to the nihilists empirical natural science seemed to be the true, the absolute, the mathematically demonstrable basis of philosophy, so was hedonism to safeguard their ethic, and was above all to make it thoroughly practical. Bazarov,
