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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 pleas-
ure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of
this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongru-
ous 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 per-
ceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling im-
materiality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in
which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to
shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss
the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply
into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been
made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever
on man s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but
returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Sec-
ond, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discover-
ies were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognised my natu-
ral body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers
HENRY JEKYLL S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE 51
that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which
these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a sec-
ond form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me
because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower ele-
ments in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I
knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled
and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of
an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibi-
tion, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to
change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at
last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my
tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a
large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments,
to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I com-
pounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the
glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of
courage, drank off the potion.
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly
nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour
of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I
came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange
in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very nov-
elty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I
was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual
images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of
obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I
knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked,
tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought,
in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out
my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act,
I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands
beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very pur-
pose of these transformations. The night however, was far gone into
the morning the morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the
conception of the day the inmates of my house were locked in the
52 THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
most rigorous hours of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was
with hope and triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to my
bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down
upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that
sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole
through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my
room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but
that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature,
to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust
and less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in
the course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of
effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much
less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde
was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as
good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly
and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still
believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint
of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in
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