p As shown above, Feuerbach reinstated materialism, but his was a metaphysical materialism.

p Many shortcomings of the metaphysical materialism were surmounted by the Russian revolutionary democrats, who set forth their philosophical views in the early 1840s and developed them for several decades.

p This was the time when a peasant, bourgeoisdemocratic revolution spearheaded against serfdom and tsarism was maturing in Russia. The revolutionary democrats Vissarion Belinsky (1811- 1848), Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), Nikolai Dobrolyubov (1836-1861), and others were the ideologists of the forthcoming revolution.

p Having realised the necessity of changing the existing social order and the righteousness of the demands put forward by the people, especially the peasants, the Russian revolutionary democrats sided decisively with the peasants, the common people, and began to substantiate in their philosophical theories the imperative need to liberate the peasants from serfdom.

p In developing their philosophical views, the Russian revolutionary democrats proceeded both from materialist philosophy of their predecessors in Russia (Lomonosov and Radishchev) and from Hegel’s dialectic and Feuerbach’s materialism. At the same time, they generalised to a certain extent 71 the advances made by natural sciences at the time.

p In contrast to Feuerbach, the Russian revolutionary democrats did not discard Hegel’s dialectic-though they did criticise Hegelianism-buttried_ to combine it with materialism grid g’vp ’* a materialist interpretation.

p Herzen was one of the first Russian revolutionary democrats who attacked Hegel’s philosophy. Though Herzen highly appraised Hegel’s dialectic, which gave a general description of the laws governing the motion and development of nature and thought, he criticised Hegel for abstracting himself from reality, and for his idealism. Hegel, Herzen wrote, “sacrifices all the temporary, all the existing for the thought and the spirit; the idealism which brought him up and which he imbibed with his mother’s milk carries him away to onesidedness. . ., he tries to suppress nature by spirit, logic; he is ready to consider any particular manifestation of it a ghost....” The Hegelian “pure being is an abyss which has engulfed all the definitions of real being. . .. One should not think, however, that real being emerges indeed from pure being-does the existing individual arise from the concept of genus?”  [71•1 

p Herzen believed that the material things that together make up nature existed in reality, not pure being. As regards spirit and thought, Herzen wrote, they are the result of the development of 72 nature, a property of material entities that have reached a certain stage in their development.

p The Russian revolutionary democrats held that reality possessed an infinite multitude of properties and was in a state of constant and ceaseless motion and development. Herzen wrote: “The life of nature is a ceaseless development. . . .”  [72•1  Belinsky wrote in the same vein: “There is no limit to the development of humanity.... Mankind will never say to itself: ’Stop, enough, there is nowhere to go.’ ”  [72•2 

p The struggle of opposites and the transformation of opposites into each other, the Russian revolutionary democrats maintained, is the source of development. This is the essence of life and truth, they said. “All the living,” Herzen wrote, “is alive and true only as one whole, as the internal and external, as the general and the individual, i.e. the co-existing. Life binds these elements together; life is a process of their eternal transformation into each other.”  [72•3  Belinsky expressed the same idea: “...Living truth consists in the unity of opposites.”  [72•4 

p The Russian revolutionary democrats also realised that, in the course of the motion and 73 development of nature, quantity turns into quality engendering something new, which differs from that which existed before. To illustrate how this law operates, Chernyshevsky, for instance, wrote: “...the combination of a known proportion of oxygen and hydrogen makes water, which possesses a multitude of qualities that are not discernible either in oxygen or in hydrogen.”  [73•1 

p Finally, the Russian revolutionary democrats, Chernyshevsky in particular, gave a thorough description of the operation in nature and society of the law of the negation of negation, ensuring continuous change, a rejection of some forms by others and repetition of old forms on a higher level.

p Thus, the Russian revolutionary democrats largely got fid ot mechanism and rnetaphysics, and made a step forward in combining dialectics and materialism and in giving a materialist interpretation and substantiation to dialectics.

p It was also to the credit of the Russian revolutionary democrats that they vigorously opposed agnosticism, which sought to raise an insurmountable wall between consciousness and reality and declared reality to be unknowable.

p Referring to the life of man and to his experience, Chernyshevsky refuted agnosticism and proved that the world was knowable and that our sense perceptions correctly reflected reality.

p In comparison with Feuerbach and his predecessors, the Russian revolutionary democrats were 74 a step closer to overcoming the contemplativeness of philosophical theories. They aspired to the transformation of the world. Herzen, for instance, considered dialectics to be, as Lenin put it, “the algebra of revolution”.

As regards their views of society, the Russian revolutionary democrats were idealists, just like their West-European predecessors and contemporaries, although they did make some materialist pronouncements on the subject.