Herzenism, we are told, became the rage, and Herzenism appears to have meant, before all, a free handling of everything in Church or State which was previously thought too sacred to be touched. This iconoclastic spirit grew more and more characteristic of Russian society at this period, and presently, under its influence, Herzenism fell into the shade, and nihilism occupied the scene. We possess various accounts of the meaning and nature of nihilism, and they all agree substantially in their description of it. The word was first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," where Arcadi Petrovitch surprises his father and uncle by describing his friend Bazaroff as a nihilist. "A nihilist," said Nicholas Petrovitch. "This word must come from the Latin _nihil_, nothing, as far as I can judge, and consequently it signifies a man who recognises nothing." "Or rather who respects nothing," said Paul Petrovitch. "A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," said Arcadi. "Does not that come to the same thing?" asked his uncle. "No, not at all. A nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has."... "Yes, before we had Hegelians; now we have nihilists. We shall see what you will do to exist in nothingness, in a vacuum, as if under an air pump." Koscheleff, writing in 1874, gives a similar explanation of nihilism. "Our disease is a disease of character, and the most dangerous possible. We suffer from a fatal unbelief in everything. We have ceased to believe in this or in that, not because we have studied the subject thoroughly and become convinced of the untenability of our views, but only because some author or another in Germany or England holds this or that doctrine to be unfounded. Our nihilism is a thing of a quite peculiar character. It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their fault-finding, their strong assertions, are grounded on nothing. They borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repeat them and magnify them _ad nauseam_, and treat persons of another way of thinking as absurd and antiquated people who continue to cherish exploded ideas and customs. The chief cause of the spread of this (I will not say doctrine, for I cannot honour it with such a name, but) sect is this, that it imparts its communications in secret conversations, so that, for one thing, it cannot be publicly criticised and refuted, and, for another, it charms by the fascination of the forbidden."