e-dealer,
I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest;
I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame,
than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge
or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction
of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of
the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides
of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily
nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to
such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I
say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that
point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines;
and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere
polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my
part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction
and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own
person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality
of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my
consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only
because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the
course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as
a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.
If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life
would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his
way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright
twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward
path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no
longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous
evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were
thus bound together--that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these
polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they
dissociated?
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light began
to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to
perceive more deeply than it has ever
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