positivism and materialism. My direct touch with Masaryk caused me to reflect upon the fundamentals of philosophic controversies. I was attracted by positivism, which rather led me away from Masaryk, who, however, continued to disturb and harass me by his destructive analysis of everything in positivism which I had regarded as philosophically sound.
My return to Prague, my preparations to take up a university post, and my work as a lecturer completed my philosophical development. Hacking my way through, so to speak, to settled views (Masaryk and his books helped me more than others), I gradually began to make these views hold good in metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and sociology. In the course of the war I transferred them from theory to practical politics. I always consciously practised politics in a scientific spirit, and if during and after the war I achieved any political successes, this was mainly due to the fact that I have always consistently applied my philosophy and my scientific method to political problems.
All these problems made me aware of the discrepancy between the culture and life of Western and Eastern Europe. It was a conflict with a noetic basis—the intellectualist West, the intuitivist and mystical East. I saw the two extremes clearly, and I formed a conclusion as to the proper relationship between them and as to their synthesis at which our nation in particular should aim.
From my earliest years the problem of religion had greatly attracted and disturbed me. Brought up as a strict Catholic, while still a boy I experienced—unconsciously and instinctively, perhaps—several phases of religious misgiving. School and university flung me into the opposite stream of religious negation, positivist opposition to religion and anti-clerical radicalism. My studies in France, England, and Germany—more particularly my experiences in England—had compelled me to seek new solutions. My internal struggle for a philosophic outlook, the study of Kant, Hume, Descartes, and Masaryk, had finally led me to adopt a positive attitude towards the problem of religion also. On this basis I had arrived at firm religious views accepting the belief in immanent teleology and in Providence as destiny.
On the philosophic side, therefore, I found myself on fairly firm ground in 1914. I felt myself sure in my philosophical and religious assumptions; I had my clarified ethical views,
