Long and painful is the list of persecutions directed against the growth of Thought, in prose and verse, and above all against illustrious men. But we must make a distinction, so as not to be unjust. Herzen, exiled and deprived of all his possessions, and the famous martyr Tchernichewsky, confined twenty and odd years in a Siberian prison or fortress, do not arouse our astonishment, for they suffered the common fate of the political agitator; but it seems a pity that such artists as Dostoiëwsky and Turguenief should suffer any such infliction at all. All Russian literature is charged with a revolutionary spirit; but there is the same difference between those authors whose aim is political and those who merely speak of Russia's wounds when occasion offers, that there is between those who are licentious and those who are simply open and candid. And by this I do not mean to compare the nihilist writers with licentious ones, nor to convey any stigma by my words. I merely say that when literature deliberately attacks established society, the instinct of self-preservation obliges the latter to defend itself even to persecuting its adversary. II. Origin of the Intellectual Revolution. Whence came the revolutionary element in Russia? From the Occident, from France, from the negative, materialist, sensualist philosophy of the Encyclopædia imported into Russia by Catherine II. and later from Germany, from Kantism and Hegelianism, imbibed by Russian youth at the German universities, and which they diffused throughout their own country with characteristic Sclav impetuosity. By "Pure Reason" and transcendental idealism, Herzen and Bakunine, the first apostles of nihilism, were inspired. But the ideas brought from Europe to Russia soon allied themselves with an indigenous or possibly an Oriental element; namely, a sort of quietist fatalism, which leads to the darkest and most despairing pessimism. On the whole, nihilism is rather a philosophical conception of the sum of life than a purely democratic and revolutionary movement. Since the beginning of this century Europe has seen mobs and revolutions, dynasties wrecked and governments overturned; but these were political disturbances, and not the result of mind diseased or anguish of soul.