A definitive judgment of nihilism is far from easy, for the nihilists were active in very various fields, in theory and practice, in philosophy and in science, in ethics and in politics, in medicine and in other technical spheres—universally.
Moreover, nihilism evolved, and assumed various forms.
Frequently a distinction is made between degrees of nihilism. Herzen, for example, who dissented from Černyševskii, spoke of the ultras, of the Sobakevičs and Nozdrevs, the Dantonists of nihilism. This subdivision of nihilism into moderate and radical wings is still current to-day. Herzen, despite his antipathy to Černyševskii's trend, himself accepted nihilism as a radical philosophical tendency. The conservative and reactionary opponents of nihilism denounced as nihilism every movement aiming at liberty, and an elementary knowledge of Latin was sufficiently widespread for the mere name to inspire terror.
A summary criticism of nihilism would be futile. We may recall the opinions of Herzen and of Strahov, that nihilism made no new contributions to thought, that the nihilists had no real understanding even of their own principles, and so on. Many took an adverse view of nihilism as the philosophy and politics of the young.
To me the true significance of the matter, the signum temporis for Russia and for Europe as well, is indeed found in the youth of the spokesmen of nihilism. In Fathers and Children, Turgenev, though half unwittingly, hit the mark. The children demanded an account from their fathers; the children wished to learn from their fathers what they themselves were to do; the children drew the logical conclusions from the parental premisses. So accurate, so logical, often enough were these deductions, that the parents were apt to become alarmed. Herzen, with sacrilegious hand, overturn the altars of the old gods, and Pisarev thereupon asks him "Are not all things now lawful?"
The Russian "children" of the sixties attempted to upbuild a new and complete philosophy of life upon the foundations that had been laid by their fathers in the forties; in all seriousness these "children" wished to become new men, desired to begin the new life. Such was the sense in which Dostoevskii conceived nihilism, looking upon it as the leading problem of the day, returning again and again to its criticism, and attempting to refute it. Following Dostoevskii's example,
