ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the struggle against the Church, secularism in the West, too, constantly developed into a specific kind of new religion pantheism, religio-philosophic immanentism, and even mysticism. But Russian secularism had an especially marked religious colouring, and was almost always clothed in some specific form of sectarianism. This inner disintegration of secularism was a characteristic and creative movement in Russian thought. This movement of thought first appeared strongly on Russian soil in the 1860's and 1870's. But the crisis which we find in two outstanding men of the time N. I. Pirogov and L. N. Tolstoy is the most striking characteristic of the period. One of them took the scientific world-view as his point of departure, the other the general cultural self-consciousness of the period. But as young men both of them were adherents of a positivistic and naturalistic world-view; both of them became profoundly disillusioned by it, and turned to a specific kind of religious world-view.
