選択した言語の要約本文はまだ利用できません。英語版を表示しています。
His scientific studies, which had turned wholly toward the mystic and transcendental, shed a strong light upon this consciousness of perpetual civil war within him. He drew steadily nearer to a truth that would prove his doom: that man is not truly one, but truly two. He conceived of it, he confessed, as a polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. From the nature of his own life, he had advanced in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in his own person, that he learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man.
If each of these natures could be housed in separate identities, he told himself, 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 on his upward path. The curse of mankind was that these incongruous elements were bound together in the agonized womb of a single consciousness.
A side light began to shine upon the subject from his laboratory table. He perceived, more deeply than it had ever been stated, the trembling immateriality of the seemingly solid body. Certain agents, he found, had the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind tosses the curtains of a pavilion. He would not enter deeply into the scientific branch of his confession, for two reasons: first, because he had learned that the doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders, and when one attempts to cast it off, it but returns with more awful pressure; and second, because his discoveries were incomplete. Enough that he had managed to compound a drug by which the higher powers of his spirit could be dethroned and a second form substituted—none the less natural because it bore the stamp of the lower elements in his soul.
He hesitated long before putting the theory to the test. He knew he risked death; any drug that so potently controlled the very fortress of identity might, by the least overdose, blot out the immaterial tabernacle it was meant only to change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame his alarm. Late one accursed night, he compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.
The original text of this work is in the public domain. This page focuses on a guided summary article, reading notes, selected quotes, and visual learning materials for educational purposes.