The main idea of the book is to show that the whole strength of what were then the Nihilists and what are now the Revolutionaries,--let us say the Maximalists,--lies, not in lofty dogmas and theories held by a vast and splendidly organised community, but simply in the strength of character of one or two men, and in the peculiar weakness of the common herd. I say the peculiar weakness with intention. It does not follow that the common herd, to which the majority of the revolutionary disciples belong, is necessarily altogether weak, but that though the men of whom it is composed may be strong and clever in a thousand ways, they have one peculiar weakness, which is, indeed, a common weakness of the Russian character. But before going into this question, it is advisable first to say that what Dostoievsky shows in his book, _The Possessed_, is that these Nihilists are almost entirely devoid of ideas; the organisations round which so many legends gather, consist in reality of only a few local clubs,--in this particular case, of one local club. All the talk of central committees, executive committees, and so forth, existed only in the imagination of the leaders. On the other hand, the character of those few men who were the leaders and who dominated their disciples, was as strong as steel and as cold as ice. And what Dostoievsky shows is how this peculiar strength of the leaders exercised itself on the peculiar weakness of the disciples. Let us now turn to the peculiar nature of this weakness. Dostoievsky explains it at the very beginning of the book. In describing one of the characters, Chatov, who is an unwilling disciple of the Nihilist leaders, he says: “He is one of those Russian Idealists whom any strong idea strikes all of a sudden, and on the spot annihilates his will, sometimes for ever. They are never able to react against the idea. They believe in it passionately, and the rest of their life passes as though they were writhing under a stone which was crushing them.”