Sacramento river. 
March 1905.

THE SOMNAMBULISTS

“’Tis only fools speak evil of the clay — The very stars are made of clay like mine.”

The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet!  Chained in the circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is good to eat.  Civilization (which is part of the circle of his imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled animal known as man.  It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes he is garbed in armour-plate.

Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy’s skull in the dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from neighbouring clans like any howling aborigine.  The flesh-and-blood body of man has not changed in the last several thousand years.  Nor has his mind changed.  There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not exist in the minds of the men of long ago.  Man has to-day no concept that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle to grasp.  Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly as the man of to-day and would achieve very similar conclusions.

It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer, thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear.  The raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in the crust of the earth.  As he persuades himself against the latter till it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands undisguised, a brute like any other brute.

Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the hungry maw of the animal beneath.  Get between him and the female of his kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like an angry cat’s, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and watch his fists clench like an orang-outang’s.  Maybe he will even beat his chest.  Touch his silly vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding pride—­call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger’s claw, or an eagle’s talon, incarnate with desire to rip and tear.

It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity.  Tell a plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer’s, and the results are the same.  Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different veneer, that is all.  It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it off.  The raw animals beneath are identical.