This assumption lay at the bottom of the reform enthusiasm in St. Petersburg at the commencement of Alexander II.’s reign.  Russia might be radically transformed, it was thought, politically and socially, according to abstract scientific principles, in the space of a few years, and be thereby raised to the level of West-European civilisation, or even higher.  The older nations had for centuries groped in darkness, or stumbled along in the faint light of practical experience, and consequently their progress had been slow and uncertain.  For Russia there was no necessity to follow such devious, unexplored paths.  She ought to profit by the experience of her elder sisters, and avoid the errors into which they had fallen.  Nor was it difficult to ascertain what these errors were, because they had been discovered, examined and explained by the most eminent thinkers of France and England, and efficient remedies had been prescribed.  Russian reformers had merely to study and apply the conclusions at which these eminent authorities had arrived, and their task would be greatly facilitated by the fact that they could operate on virgin soil, untrammelled by the feudal traditions, religious superstitions, metaphysical conceptions, romantic illusions, aristocratic prejudices, and similar obstacles to social and political progress which existed in Western Europe.

Such was the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Russian educated classes lived during the early years of the sixties.  On the “men with aspirations,” who had longed in vain for more light and more public activity under the obscurantist, repressive regime of the preceding reign, it had an intoxicating effect.  The more excitable and sanguine amongst them now believed seriously that they had discovered a convenient short-cut to national prosperity, and that for Russia a grandiose social and political millennium was at hand.*

* I was not myself in St. Petersburg at that period, but on arriving a few years afterwards I became intimately acquainted with men and women who had lived through it, and who still retained much of their early enthusiasm.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that one of the most prominent characteristics of the time was a boundless, child-like faith in the so-called “latest results of science.”  Infallible science was supposed to have found the solution of all political and social problems.  What a reformer had to do—­and who was not a would-be reformer in those days?—­was merely to study the best authorities.  Their works had been long rigidly excluded by the Press censure, but now that it was possible to obtain them, they were read with avidity.  Chief among the new, infallible prophets whose works were profoundly venerated was Auguste Comte, the inventor of Positivism.  In his classification of the sciences the crowning of the edifice was sociology, which taught how to organise human society on scientific principles.