Herzen argued that the mind must be educated by ‘facts’, otherwise the ‘monkish drop in the soul’ would spread wide and obscure any possibility of cognition. However, there is reason to believe that ‘facts’ in themselves do not yet have an educative power. Even more than that: that knowledge of ‘facts’, no matter how many of them there are, does not bring us any closer to the cognition of reality.

Herzen, like many, was captive to ready-made ideas and oppositions: either ‘monastic cell’ or ‘cognition of the world’. His thought was not aimed at the truly existent. By ‘monk’ Herzen understood not a man whose aim was to suppress mental and soul passions, but some imaginary ‘obscurantist’; in ‘cognition’ he saw not a philosophically grounded (that is, in the humility of the mind passing) study of external things, but an enthusiastic embrace of the ‘truth itself’…

So it has remained from the time of Herzen. The monk is condemned, the scientist exalted. But what are these ‘facts’? Why do ‘facts’ ennoble our minds, and do they have any ennobling power at all? I have asked this question before, and received some answers.   Let us look at the matter from the other side.

Herzen readily contrasted the scientist and the monk. Our time does the same. In modern minds, science is associated with ‘sober facts’, religion with ‘fiction’, a repulsion from the truth. Truth and ‘facts’ are thus equated, but this equation is false. It is enough to do a little thinking to see the difference: truth is outside us and independent of us; facts (I have already had occasion to say this) are largely made up of our opinions. A scientist in general has to deal much more with perceptions than with facts — unlike, say, a carpenter. The higher one goes on the path of generalisations, the further one gets from ‘simple and undoubted’ truths. The human mind, however, desires simplicity and certainty in everything. The scientist is no exception, he is also a human being, however much science would like to dispute this and go into the realm of the ‘superhuman’… As a rule, he prefers a simple truth to a profound one. ‘Simple truth’, as worldly experience tells us, is a lie — if not in all cases, then in many.

The spiritual life has its temptations, of which many are aware, including those who have no idea of the spirit. Everyone has heard of the sins of poets — it is even surprising how many of these ‘knowing ones’ there are compared to the number of those who know the meaning and greatness of poetry. The temptations of the religious path, of self-deceptions and delusions, are also known to those who have never once in their lives thought about their own souls and God. But there are also temptations of science, and the temptations are secret, about which few people know — so strong is the faith in incorruptible and pure, sober and penetrating thought… There are not only the passions of poets, not only the passions of believing souls — there are also the passions of the mind.

I am not going to talk about any deep and, so to speak, crushing ‘secret sins’. Science is characterised by the same things as human nature, over which it thinks to rise — without sufficient, however, grounds. The main thing is overconfidence in itself, in its methods of enquiry, and pride of mind. Instead of the ancient, sober ‘Ignoramus et ignorabimus’ [1] (about the most important, last mysteries) we hear from the scientist of our days words about ‘truth’ extracted from ‘facts’. The world has shrunk to the size of our perception of it, and, I repeat, every new opinion is considered to be the ‘final truth’ based on ‘immutable facts’. But whatever our sensory and mental experience, it cannot exhaust the universe. No matter how long our cognition lasts, there will still remain in the world an immeasurably, inconceivably large X, a mysterious quantity that cannot be cognised by experience.

What about the ‘facts’? Nobody cancels them. We admit, however, that interpretation is half of a fact, and in some cases it supports our favourite theory for lack of convenient, i. e. confirming observations. Let us also recognise that facts about the world and facts about man are accumulated in two independent series, and the desire to summarise one series by discarding values from the other leads only to a knowingly false result. That ‘monk’ hated by Herzen had a noteworthy series of information about the human soul — quite comparable (and in the opinion of many, more important), with the same series of information obtained by a chemist or astronomer. More important — because, having a well-founded judgement about man, one can weigh the stars; and not having such a judgement, it is better not to engage in weighing the stars, so as not to fall into incorrigible and dangerous mistakes…

For the passions of the mind — and we are talking about them — are such that they distort the judgement of those things in which we consider ourselves infallible, or at least standing on solid ground.

[1] ‘We don’t know and we shall not know’.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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