here was
animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could
say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?
How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists!
And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various
schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the
body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of
spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter
was a mystery also.

He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a
science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it
was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to
their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of
warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation
of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow
and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in
experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself.
All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same
as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we
would do many times, and with joy.

It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by
which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and
certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to
promise rich and fruitful results. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane
was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no
doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire
for new experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex
passion. What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of
boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination,
changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from
sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. It was the
passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most
strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we
were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were
experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

While Lord Henry sat dreaming