An excerpt from The Picture
of Dorian Gray…. |
Written by Oscar Wilde,
and published in 1890. |
But
he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development
by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house
in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night,
or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon
is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things
strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany
it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic
doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a
curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly
cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the
conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical
conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said
of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance
compared with life itself. He felt keenly consious of how barren all intellectual
speculation is when seperated from action and experiment. He knew that
the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
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