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PARTISAN REVIEW
the peripheral, the essential and the trivial; and again, the root and
the branch, the wood and the trees; but above all between the true
and the specious, the suppositious, the illusory, the "made up," the
false. Upon the validity of the analysis, conscious or unconscious, of
where this distinction lies depends the depth of a man's insight, his
capacity for discovering and telling the truth. Nor was the importance
attached to the social factor due merely to its supposed efficacy as the
major cause of historical change. The domination of social over in–
dividual categories in the interpretation both of life and literature by
a teacher who bound his spell on a generation like Chernyshevsky was
not simply the expansion of the bald formula that social factors condi–
tion the behaviour and thought of individuals and not
vice versa,·
it
sprang from the view that to understand the universe correctly was
to distinguish between what does and what does not matter a great
deal; and the concept of "what matters" was not tantamount to the no–
tion of causal efficiency, unless causality accounted for the behaviour of
everything that constituted the universe; but even the most crass
materialists did not suppose that the world was explicable solely in
terms
of physics, but saw it as a single inter-connected universe, con–
taining experiences of every
type,
intellectual and mental, perceptual
and volitional; only an accurate understanding of its nature whether in
terms
of some mechanical model or
some
other pattern could preserve
one
from confounding important questions with trivial ones, from
looking for solutions in regions which could not provide them.
Chernyshevsky accepted this primacy of the metaphysical over all
other questions, and differed from his opponents only in believing that
the most essential thing to grasp was one's own position in the economic
scheme in relation to that of everyone and everything else, for that
alone could endow the questioner with that understanding which the
Greek philosophers and Christian mystics, nationalists and empiricists,
German romantics and French ideologues, Oriental wisdom and western
science, were all equally trying to provide. The opposition-anti-utili–
tarians, metaphysical writers like Odoevsky, Chaadaev and Tyutchev,
"pure artists" like Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Fet, moralists and
prophets like Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solovyov, even Symbolists
who pictured art as a supernatural relationship to unutterable es–
sences to which the visual world is mysteriously related-all these ac–
cepted this common premise, namely that it was an obligation to see
as deeply as
one
could, and describe what one saw; the artist was merely
a
seer
of a specific kind whose vision differed from, and perhaps was
superior to, but was vision literally in the same sense as that of the
