HENRY JEKYLL'S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE
I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune, endowed besides withexcellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respectof the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have beensupposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguishedfuture. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaietyof disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as Ifound it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my headhigh, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when Ireached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stockof my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed toa profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned suchirregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I hadset before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense ofshame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than anyparticular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, witheven a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me thoseprovinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on thathard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of themost plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-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 knowledgeor the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the directionof my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and thetranscendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness ofthe perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sidesof my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadilynearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed tosuch a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. Isay two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond thatpoint. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines;and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a merepolity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for mypart, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one directionand in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my ownperson, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive dualityof man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of myconsciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was onlybecause I was radically both; and from an early date, even before thecourse of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most nakedpossibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, asa beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, lifewould be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go hisway, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more uprighttwin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upwardpath, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and nolonger exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneousevil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots werethus bound together--that in the agonised womb of consciousness, thesepolar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were theydissociated?
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light beganto shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began toperceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the tremblingimmateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid bodyin which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power toshake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might tossthe curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enterdeeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because Ihave been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is boundfor ever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to castit off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awfulpressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident,my discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognisedmy natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of thepowers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by whichthese powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second formand countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because theywere the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. Iknew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlledand shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple ofan overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it tochange. But the temptation of a