I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with
himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred
times affected by the dangers that he runs through his
brutish, physical insensibility ; neither had I, long as I
had considered my position, made enough allowance for
the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness
to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward
Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My
devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I
was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more
unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must
have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that
tempest of impatience with which I listened to the civil-
ities of my unhappy victim ; I declare, at least, before
God, no man morally sane could have been guilty of
that crime upon so pitiful a provocation ; and that I
struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a



DB. JBKTLL AND ME. HYDE. 397

sick child may break a plaything. But I had Tolun-
tarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by
which even the worst of us continues to walk with some
degree of steadiness among temptations ; and in my
case, to be tempted, howerer slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged.
