Niebuhr or Sismondi, is preferable to the modern history of civilisation.
His historical speculations recall those of Buckle, who works he eagerly studied while in Siberia. For example, he considers that the cradle of the human race must have been in the equatorial regions, and suggests that it is a masked patriotism which induces various historians to contend that the climate of the temperate zones was once milder than it is to-day. However, the later stages of human development are determined, not by nutritive conditions, but by the political organisation of society.
Černyševskii gives a detailed exposition of his egoistic ethics, going so far as to equate good-rational-useful with bad-irrational-injurious. Černyševskii conceives the moral criterion as an imperative no less than does Kant; he is indeed positively apriorist when he declares that this criterion has an identical and absolute applicability, not to the inhabitants of this planet alone, but to the reputed dwellers on other worlds than ours. (We may compare the reserve which led Mill to say that the law of causality must be assumed as applicable only within the domain of the known solar system!)
In metaphysics, Černyševskii continues to profess materialism, and is faithful to his old love for Spinoza and Feuerbach. He has no fault to find with Feuerbach, but points out that the German discussed only the religious aspect of philosophy.
He tells us that his views are Newtonist, that the law of gravitation is universally valid, forgetting that he is here following in Comte's footsteps. Concerning Comte we read that the French philosopher had nothing to offer beyond a misreading of Kant; there had never been any theological stage of knowledge; nor will Černyševskii admit that there was a metaphysical stage such as was conceived by Comte.
Most energetically does he repudiate the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, writing: "Melancholia is not science." His rationalism leads him to protest against scepticism. Pascal, he says, was the last of the honest sceptics; as a rule, scepticism is no more than a mask for obscurantism. Quite consistently, he expresses his disapproval of the positivist "ignorabimus."
Noteworthy is the admission that after the age of twenty-two he had read no works on natural science.
