Herzen grasped so accurately when he counterposed positivistic atheism and materialism, realistic nihilism, to ecclesiastical mythology and theocracy. Herzen was himself proof against this disillusionment, but he could not wholly escape the crushing influence of science. He was keenly aware of the extreme sobriety of Protestantism, in which faith his mother had brought him up; and he emphatically rejected Protestantism for the Russians, saying that it was a bourgeois creed.
Herzen never realised the true implications of the mental revolution he had personally experienced, and the same remark applies to his philosophical successors. He rightly rejected Bakunin's revolutionism, but he failed to recognise that an appeal to Feuerbach was requisite to revolutionise Bakunin the believer. Herzen understood that Bakuninist, that Russian revolutionism was not the democracy to which he aspired. He was on the right track, but to Herzen, as to Bakunin, and to all the two men's successors, the Kantian criticism was lacking. He was right when he declared that the Latin world, though it had sufficient energy for a movement towards liberation, lacked the strength requisite for the enjoyment of freedom: but the true significance of the remark becomes apparent to those only who have grasped the nature of theocracy, and above all of Catholic theocracy; to those who have understood how and why Catholicism, while favourable to the growth of revolutionism, is comparatively unfavourable to the growth of democracy.
