Russia had merely to adopt the principles laid down and expounded at great length in the Cours de Philosophie Positive.  There Comte explained that humanity had to pass through three stages of intellectual development—­the religious, the metaphysical, and the positive—­and that the most advanced nations, after spending centuries in the two first, were entering on the third.  Russia must endeavour, therefore, to get into the positive stage as quickly as possible, and there was reason to believe that, in consequence of certain ethnographical and historical peculiarities, she could make the transition more quickly than other nations.  After Comte’s works, the book which found, for a time, most favour was Buckle’s “History of Civilisation,” which seemed to reduce history and progress to a matter of statistics, and which laid down the principle that progress is always in the inverse ratio of the influence of theological conceptions.  This principle was regarded as of great practical importance, and the conclusion drawn from it was that rapid national progress was certain if only the influence of religion and theology could be destroyed.  Very popular, too, was John Stuart Mill, because he was “imbued with enthusiasm for humanity and female emancipation”; and in his tract on Utilitarianism he showed that morality was simply the crystallised experience of many generations as to what was most conducive to the greatest good of the greatest number.  The minor prophets of the time, among whom Buchner occupied a prominent place, are too numerous to mention.

Strange to say, the newest and most advanced doctrines appeared regularly, under a very thin and transparent veil, in the St. Petersburg daily Press, and especially in the thick monthly magazines, which were as big as, or bigger than, our venerable quarterlies.  The art of writing and reading “between the lines,” not altogether unknown under the Draconian regime of Nicholas I., was now developed to such a marvellous extent that almost any thing could be written clearly enough to be understood by the initiated without calling for the thunderbolts of the Press censors, which was now only intermittently severe.  Indeed, the Press censors themselves were sometimes carried away by the reform enthusiasm.  One of them long afterwards related to me that during “the mad time,” as he called it, in the course of a single year he had received from his superiors no less than seventeen reprimands for passing objectionable articles without remark.

The movement found its warmest partisans among the students and young literary men, but not a few grey-beards were to be found among the youthful apostles.  All who read the periodical literature became more or less imbued with the new spirit; but it must be presumed that many of those who discoursed most eloquently had no clear idea of what they were talking about; for even at a later date, when the novices had had time to acquaint themselves with the doctrines they professed, I often encountered the most astounding ignorance.  Let me give one instance by way of illustration: