Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia an almost enthusiastic attitude toward natural sciences was very wide spread within intelligentsia, often combined with a progressive political orientation. My chapter would focus on two moments: the second half of the nineteenth century was the epoch of the triumph of natural sciences, and physiology in particular. Since the end of the 1850s German materialism aroused the enthusiasm of the young people, dissatisfied with Idealism, and soon afterward French and English positivism, as well as evolutionism, arrived in Russia; at the end of the nineteenth century, early twentieth-century scientists themselves started discussing the issue of the so-called bankruptcy of science: as it turned out, science could not give conclusive results, and the most basic concepts such as “matter,” “force,” “cause,” lost their long-standing power within scientific knowledge and proved to be just the results of conventional agreements among scientists themselves. That was quite a wide cultural phenomenon in the whole of Europe, but it became especially important in Russia, exactly because of the specific role science had played in Russian cultural background. Alexander Bogdanov described that time as “the epoch of a great and unprecedented revolution in the world of scientific knowledge, when scientific laws, which seemed to be the most secure and universal vacillate and fall down, giving way to new surprising forms and opening unexpected and incommensurable perspectives.”