nature, in heaven and on earth; this is made understandable to the higher aspirations of the human spirit; in this way I am saying science is the purest education of man and humankind” (Hurban 1846, 1–14). Obviously, he means a different concept of science than the one current today. It explores the spirit as well as matter, inner worlds as well as outer nature; and it aims above all at education, and the enrichment and moral improvement of man, and less at material affluence. Cultivating the shoots of Slavonic science should actually have been the primary goal of Slovenské pohľady, since it should serve as the “purgatory” of Slovaksandraise themfrom their misery and unify the Slovak intelligentsia. The coming of the age of the Slavs will only come with Slavonic science, and not before. The constitutive feature of Slavonic science is its integrality: “The foremost move of Slavonic science shall and must be the spiritual vision of the whole truth” (Hurban 1846, 9). “The defining characteristic of Slavonic science is its wholeness, its roundedness. Slavonic science must draw all particulars together into one whole and unify all ruptures and fragmentariness, for if it would not do this, it would cease to be Slavonic. Our science is a sea into which all streams of science merge. The science of the Slavs must be an absolute unity of all epistemological moments of true cognition” (Hostinský 1851, 123). The Štúr group followed up the ideas of their Polish contemporary, Bronisław Trentowski, a philosopher, pedagogue and patriot. The chief subject of his philosophy was universality, an emergence from one-sided solutions, a synthesis of objective with subjective knowledge, and sensualism with idealism. They expected the development of integral knowledge from the Slavs. Along with Hegel and Herder, they looked at history as a story wherein individual cultures come forward in a sequence. Each one of them contributes to the temple of mankind with something unique whereby the World Spirit brings history one step closer to its final goal. Ancient Indian, Persian, Graeco-Roman, and Romanic cultures reached their zenith in the past and nowadays Germanic culture is experiencing its peak. The Slavs are the last branch of Indo-Europeans whose cultural peak is still under preparation and lies ahead of them – they are “the youngest son in the tale of mankind” (Hostinský 1851, 125). After Germanic culture, the Slavonic one shall follow: “Every nation has its time under God’s sun, and linden blossoms only once the oak blossom has passed” (Štúr 1993, 59). According to the Štúr group, the Romanic peoples manifested a talent for empirical observation, but they developed it one-sidedly and got stuck in mindless materialism. The Germanic peoples tended to a one-sided idealism and ended up in speculations about total abstractions. The Slavs are supposed to merge both moments harmoniously: “what both of themmeant for their world, all of that must be fused into a single moment by the Slavonic seer, who shall see, recount and ‘sing’ the truth as observed originally with his Slavonic eye” (Hurban 1846, 9). The Slavic vision should at last be the fullness of all the partial moments of knowledge developed by preceding cultures – “the temple of all moments of knowledge”, “thepantheonofall godsof truth”, 50 (14) Emil Páleš
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