Bakunin was more in unison with the troubled spirit of the times. While Herzen had been ripening in political wisdom under the ampler intellectual life to which his exile introduced him, Bakunin's twelve years' confinement had maddened him into a fanatic, and instead of curing him of revolutionary propensities, only fixed the idea of revolution in his mind like a mania. When he came to London a huge, haggard man, always excited, always talking, he used to speak of himself as a Prometheus unbound, and he was to live henceforth for the undoing of the powers and systems that were. He was never found without a group of conspirators and refugees of all shades and nationalities about him. With some reminiscences of socialistic philosophy remaining in the background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His socialism itself had grown less sane--it was no longer the anarchism of the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"--society not merely without governmental institutions, but without institutions of any kind; and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which all States and Churches and all institutions religious, political, judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destruction" are not articles of a rational creed, but they were propagated with almost preternatural energy by Bakunin. The work of exciting revolution and disorder of any kind was the main business of his life till he died in 1876. Others might play a waiting game, but for him the work of the revolutionist was revolution; and he ought to be incessantly promoting it, not by word only, but by deed, by an unremitting terrorism, by shooting a policeman when you can't reach a king, and destroying a Bastile if you cannot overturn an empire. In his "Revolutionary Catechism," written in cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at a Russian nihilist trial in 1871, he says (I quote the passage from M. de Laveleye):--