frontier with such a passport that I was horror-stricken when I saw it. It had been “arranged so amateurishly that it would have aroused my suspicions at the first glance—but the German frontier official never noticed it. Nor was Huza touched when he often passed with me unscathed through the street fighting in Russia. Once we were going with Klecanda to the Kieff railway station to see Muravieff, when a shot was fired, the bullet striking a telegraph post in front of us. So close to us did it fly that we felt the air it displaced. The same Providence watched over us both.
People often made merry over the idea that Professors like Wilson, Masaryk and Beneš, and men of science like Štefánik, should decide questions of international policy. Our professorships mattered little; and there are professors and professors. What mattered was that we, at least we three Czechoslovaks, had won our positions by work and diligence, and that I was born poor and never grew rich. Thus I gained knowledge of men and of life and, with all my theorizing, remained practical. The same is true of Beneš and Štefánik. I never wanted to be a professor; I wanted to be a diplomatist and a politician. In Vienna, when I was unable to enter the Oriental Academy and to take up a diplomatic career, I was very unhappy; yet I ended by becoming a politician and a diplomatist! Though I wished not to be a professor, fate soon made a teacher of me. After a short apprenticeship as an artisan, I had to give lessons in order to earn my living as a high school and university student. Nor, later, was I to be spared a professorship; yet it did me no harm and even helped me politically.
In philosophy I strove to attain scientific precision, concreteness and realism. The philosophy of the schools estranged me, for it was a survival and continuation of medieval Scholasticism. Metaphysics I did not like, for I found no satisfaction therein. In my eyes philosophy was, above all, ethics, sociology and politics. I might be styled, in the jargon of the learned, an “activist” or, perhaps, a “voluntarist,” for I have always been active: a worker. I have never recognized an antagonism between theory and practice, that is to say, between correct theory and right practice; and just as I opposed one-sided intellectualism I stood out against practice divorced from thought. Plato was my first and chief political teacher; then Vico, Rousseau, Comte, Marx and others. My first considerable work “On Suicide” gives in a nutshell a philosophy of history and an analysis of our modern
