ABSTRACT
The break with the ecclesiastical world-view, which began in the second half of the seventeenth century and attained full expression in the eighteenth, raised the question as we have seen of the creation of a new ideology. The first theoretical statements of this new ideology advanced a programme of humanism, foundations for which were sought in pure morality, and frequently in natural law. But toward the end of the eighteenth century moralistic humanism was complicated by the introduction of an aesthetic principle; and this form of humanism, which derived from Schiller's idea of the Schone Seele, long remained the dominant Russian ideology. The Russian intelligentsia, as we have seen, retained one feature of the former ecclesiastical consciousness-what we have called its theurgical idea. Theurgical restlessness kept thought and conscience at the height of historiosophical universalism; in this way a concern was developed and strengthened in the Russian intelligentsia for universally-human themes.
