The lack of a philosophy of history is partly the outcome of Černyševskii's rationalism. He followed Feuerbach rather than Hegel; he followed the rationalists generally, in whom the historical sense had not yet awakened. Černyševskii's whole dialectic is unhistorical; it is logical, rationalistic. Černyševskii adopts the prehegelian and precomtist outlook, the outlook of a day when the evolutionary idea had not become established. We can see that in part, too, he was influenced, in this connection, by the materialistic view of the individual and of the social organism, in accordance with which progress, history, is explained as organic or physiological growth. In his polemic against Čičerin (1859), we already find him defending the opinion that every really live man will and must, as a student of science, bring his conviction of what is right into play in his scientific work as well as elsewhere. "The only persons who will not display their convictions in this manner are those who have no convictions."
Černyševskii expressly condemns Roscher's historical method, and does so with much justice, for the method is utterly fallacious. He makes a distinction between "the theory of the object" and its history; he admits that the two branches of knowledge "are closely connected each with the other," but does not attempt a more precise study of the nature of the connection. He was perhaps thinking of Comte's distinction between sociological statics and dynamics. But all that his disquisition discloses is.that he chiefly had in mind the "constantly" existing objects, and above all had in mind the present, which he did not think of as history, for he thought of history (wrongly, of course) rather as the study of remote times.
Nevertheless we find that Černyševskii expresses the view that history is the basis of theory, at least in the domain of art. "The history of art is the foundation of the theory of art."
For the elucidation of economic ideas, Černyševskii makes use of a "hypothetical method" which is tantamount to the resurrection of our old friend Robinson Crusoe, so familiar in economic disquisitions. He "hypothetically" assumes the existence of a social order wherein the phenomena under consideration are displayed in their essential simplicity. He fails to notice that his abstraction from existing facts may readily become most unrealistic.
