y them, for we can
profit by their errors, and avoid those deep-rooted evils from which
they are suffering. He who has just been born is happier than he who is
dying."

Thus, we see, a patriotic reaction against the introduction of foreign
institutions and the inordinate admiration of foreign culture already
existed in Russia more than a century ago. It did not, however, take the
form of a philosophical theory till a much later period, when a similar
movement was going on in various countries of Western Europe.

After the overthrow of the great Napoleonic Empire a reaction against
cosmopolitanism took place and a romantic enthusiasm for nationality
spread over Europe like an epidemic. Blind, enthusiastic patriotism
became the fashionable sentiment of the time. Each nation took to
admiring itself complacently, to praising its own character and
achievements, and to idealising its historical and mythical past.
National peculiarities, "local colour," ancient customs, traditional
superstitions--in short, everything that a nation believed to be
specially and exclusively its own, now raised an enthusiasm similar to
that which had been formerly excited by cosmopolitan conceptions founded
on the law of nature. The movement produced good and evil results.
In serious minds it led to a deep and conscientious study of history,
national literature, popular mythology, and the like; whilst in
frivolous, inflammable spirits it gave birth merely to a torrent of
patriotic fervour and rhetorical exaggeration. The Slavophils were the
Russian representatives of this nationalistic reaction, and displayed
both its serious and its frivolous elements.

Among the most important products of this movement in Germany was the
Hegelian theory of universal history. According to Hegel's views,
which were generally accepted by those who occupied themselves with
philosophical questions, universal history was described as "Progress in
the consciousness of freedom" (Fortschritt im Bewusstsein der Freiheit).
In each period of the world's history, it was explained, some one
nation or race had been intrusted with the high mission of enabling the
Absolute Reason, or Weltgeist, to express itself in objective existence,
while the other nations and races had for the time no metaphysical
justification for their existence, and no higher duty than to imitate
slavishly the favoured rival in which the Weltgeist had for the moment
chosen to incorporate itself. The in