But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism, and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own blessed immortality.

True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away.  And there’s the rub.  He has to effect adjustments with the real world and at the same time maintain the sublimity of his dream.  The result of this admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded.  The man that walks the real world in his sleep becomes such a tangled mass of contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that he has to lie to himself in order to stay asleep.

In passing, it may be noted that some men are remarkably constituted in this matter of self-deception.  They excel at deceiving themselves.  They believe, and they help others to believe.  It becomes their function in society, and some of them are paid large salaries for helping their fellow-men to believe, for instance, that they are not as other animals; for helping the king to believe, and his parasites and drudges as well, that he is God’s own manager over so many square miles of earth-crust; for helping the merchant and banking classes to believe that society rests on their shoulders, and that civilization would go to smash if they got out from under and ceased from their exploitations and petty pilferings.

Prize-fighting is terrible.  This is the dictum of the man who walks in his sleep.  He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and worries the legislators about it.  There is nothing of the brute about him.  He is a sublimated soul that treads the heights and breathes refined ether—­in self-comparison with the prize-fighter.  The man who walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of muscle, joint, and nerve.  He feels that there is something godlike in the mysterious deeps of his being, denies his relationship with the brute, and proceeds to go forth into the world and express by deeds that something godlike within him.

He sits at a desk and chases dollars through the weeks and months and years of his life.  To him the life godlike resolves into a problem something like this:  Since the great mass of men toil at producing wealth, how best can he get between the great mass of men and the wealth they produce, and get A Slice for himself?  With tremendous exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this purpose.  As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound.  He bribes legislatures, buys judges, “controls”