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What a stride it is from this to the conceptions of the
youngest generation about the right of women freely to
give themselves away and freely recede, and their ideas
of the common work of the sexes for the freedom and
happiness of the masses!
And yet, if the distance is enormous between these
alert and sprightly young people and those for whom
and among whom they would labor, the contrast between
an intelligentia with its system of morals and the official
world of Russia, which holds in its hands the whole
administration and all the material means of the country,
is not less immense.
Here is an intelligent élite, for whom the rule of
ethics is not the official patent morality, — nay, even not
the legal — for the motto, “Nothing unlawful,” is, for
many who belong to it, the stamp of the Philistine, —
but for whom above all ethics stands that which they
call the divine spark, — this spark which Dostoyevski
traces out and finds even in criminals and the partially
insane, and for whom morality is what they call “the
unconscious condition,” — that is, that in which the
individual does what is right without exertion, without
self-conquest, because it agrees with his nature.
Imagine an intelligentia with these rules of ethics, as
a spiritual guiding power in a state which is ruled and
governed as Russia, — where the most ignorant bigotry,
in the darkest of the Christian creeds, is the law and
fashion, which from the court is diffused downwards, and
where a single man’s will, even if he has none, is the
supreme controlling law.
These two underlying powers are drawing away from
each other on every side. What does it lead to? Can
any mortal draught the parallelogram of these forces, the
resulting tendency and its course?
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