s at the same time a creative
desire."[10]

Even so brief a glimpse into Bakounin's mind is likely to startle the
reader. But there is no fiction here; he is what Carlyle would have
called "a terrible God's Fact." He was a very real product of Russia's
infamy, and we need not be surprised if one with Bakounin's great
talents, worshiping Satan and preaching ideas of destruction that
comprehended Cosmos itself, should have performed in the world a unique
and never-to-be-forgotten role. It was inevitable that he should have
stood out among the men of his time as a strange, bewildering figure. To
his very matter-of-fact and much annoyed antagonist, Karl Marx, he was
little more than a buffoon, the "amorphous pan-destroyer, who has
succeeded in uniting in one person Rodolphe, Monte Cristo, Karl Moor,
and Robert Macaire."[11] On the other hand, to his circle of worshipers
he was a mental giant, a flaming titan, a Russian Siegfried, holding out
to all the powers of heaven and earth a perpetual challenge to combat.
And, in truth, Bakounin's ideas and imagination covered a field that is
not exhausted by the range of mythology. He juggled with universal
abstractions as an alchemist with the elements of the earth or an
astrologist with the celestial spheres. His workshop was the universe,
his peculiar task the refashioning of Cosmos, and he began by declaring
war upon the Almighty himself and every institution among men fashioned
after what he considered to be the absolutism of the Infinite.

It is, then, with no ordinary human being that we must deal in treating
of him who is known as the father of terrorism. Yet, as he lived in this
world and fought with his faithful circle to lay down the principles of
universal revolution, we find him very human indeed. Of contradictions,
for instance, there seems to be no end. Although an atheist, he had an
idol, Satan. Although an eternal enemy of absolutism, he pleaded with
Alexander to become the Czar of the people. And, although he fought
passionately and superbly to destroy what he called the "authoritarian
hierarchy" in the organization of the International, he planned for his
own purpose the most complete hierarchy that can well be imagined. His
only tactic, that of _lex talionis_, also worked out a perfect
reciprocity even in those common affairs to which this prodigy stooped
in order to conquer, for he seemed to create infallibly every
institution he combated and to use every weapon