cease to look down upon people from above in profound and unconcealed contempt. Science, even more than the New Testament, teaches us humility. Science cannot look down on anything from above, for to science this expression "from above" has no meaning. Science knows nothing of contempt, does not lie to secure an end, nor conceal anything through caprice. Science faces facts, as investigator and often as physician, but never as executioner, never with hostility and irony. Science (there is no reason why I should hide words in the depths of my soul), science is love, as Spinoza says of thought and knowledge.
Byron's Lucifer and irony are definitively dethroned; their place is taken by love, by that humanity which Herzen adduces as characteristic of Bělinskii and his Russian friends and opponents. Despite all the "fanaticism of conviction," this Russian humanity is on occasions gentle and yielding. At any rate Herzen finds peculiar "hesitations" in himself. In 1863, for example, he made concessions to Bakunin, in defiance of his own convictions.[1]
In the same year in which he makes a confession of faith in the nihilism of love, he comes to terms with Bakunin, and declares: "To say, Do not believe! is no less dictatorial and in truth no less foolish than to say, Believe!"
Herzen attains to the idea of duty as well as to the idea of love.
In his first philosophical essays Herzen expresses his hostility to Buddhism and to dilettantism in science. Pure philosophical theory without bearings on life has for him neither value nor meaning. "Man," he says, "does not live by logic alone; man has his work to do in the social—historical morally free and positively active world. Man does not merely possess capacity to formulate ideas of renunciation, but he possesses also will, which may be termed the positive, the creative understanding."
This formulation, derived from German idealism, and published in 1843, frequently recurs in Herzen's writings. (Homjakov's identification of will and understanding dates from 1859, and is derived from the same source.)
The problem of duty, the question why the individual ought to act in one way rather than in another, why he decides
- ↑ In the essay of 1866, Superfluous Persons and Spiteful Persons, the superfluous persons (Oněgin, Pečorin) are defended against the realists. The essay is by some regarded as a polemic against Černyševskii.
