"Man is originally a wild beast, a cousin of the gorilla. But he has already come out of the deep night of bestial impulses to make his way to the light of the mind. This explains all his former missteps in the most natural way, and comforts us somewhat with regard to his present aberrations. He has turned his back on bestial slavery, and is now moving toward freedom through the realm of slavery to God, which lies between his bestial and his human existence. Behind us, therefore, lies our bestial existence, before us our human; the light of humanity, which alone can light us and warm us, deliver us and exalt us, make us free, happy, and brothers, stands never at the beginning of history, but always only at its end."[332] This "historical negation of the past takes place now slowly, sluggishly, sleepily, but now again passionately and violently."[333] It always takes place with the inevitable certainty of natural law: "we believe in the final triumph of humanity on earth."[G] "We yearn for the coming of this triumph, and seek to hasten it with united effort";[334] "we must never look back, always forward alone; before us is our sun, before us our bliss."[335] 3.--LAW I. _In the progress of mankind from its bestial existence to a human existence, one of the next steps, according to Bakunin, will be the disappearance--not indeed of law, but--of enacted law._ Enacted law belongs to a low stage of evolution. "A political legislation, whether it is based on a ruler's will or on the votes of representatives chosen by universal suffrage, can never correspond to the laws of nature, and is always baleful, hostile to the liberty of the masses, if only because it forces upon them a system of external and consequently despotic laws."[336] No legislation has ever "had another aim than that of confirming, and exalting into a system, the exploitation of the laboring populace by the ruling classes."[337] Thus every legislation "has for its consequence at once the enslavement of society and the depravation of the legislators."[338] But mankind will soon leave behind it the stage of evolution to which law belongs. Enacted law is indissolubly connected with the State: "the State is a historically necessary evil,"[339] "a transitory form of society";[340] "with the State, law in the jurists' sense, the so-called legal regulation of popular life from above downward by legislation, must necessarily fall."[341] Everybody feels already that this moment is approaching,[342] the transformation is at hand,[343] it is to be expected within the nineteenth century.[344]