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HASTIE LANYON . HENRY JEKYLL’S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE I was born in the year 18 — to a large fortune , endowed besides with excellent parts , inclined by nature to industry , fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen , and thus , as might have been supposed , with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future . And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition , such as has made the happiness of many , but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high , and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public . Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures ; and that when I reached years of reflection , and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world , I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life . Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of ; but from the high views that I had set before me , I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame . It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults , that made me what I was , and , with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men , severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature . In this case , I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life , which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most 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 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 .
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