tivity under the obscurantist, repressive regime of the
preceding reign, it had an intoxicating effect. The more excitable and
sanguine amongst them now believed seriously that they had discovered
a convenient short-cut to national prosperity, and that for Russia a
grandiose social and political millennium was at hand.*

* I was not myself in St. Petersburg at that period, but on
arriving a few years afterwards I became intimately
acquainted with men and women who had lived through it, and
who still retained much of their early enthusiasm.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that one of the most
prominent characteristics of the time was a boundless, child-like faith
in the so-called "latest results of science." Infallible science
was supposed to have found the solution of all political and social
problems. What a reformer had to do--and who was not a would-be reformer
in those days?--was merely to study the best authorities. Their works
had been long rigidly excluded by the Press censure, but now that it was
possible to obtain them, they were read with avidity. Chief among the
new, infallible prophets whose works were profoundly venerated was
Auguste Comte, the inventor of Positivism. In his classification of the
sciences the crowning of the edifice was sociology, which taught how to
organise human society on scientific principles. 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