“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 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 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 labored 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 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 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 insensibilities; 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, and he come out roaring.”
Dan Curtis produced this story for television and it's one of his best, with Jack Palance. Bob Cobert's score will live on.
Kerouac read it, interestingly, at the start of his alcoholic breakdown at Big Sur. Romans 7 set the stage for the meltdown; and he never tried to defend himself or shift the blame.
Stevenson's book is so fine.
Then there's Hammer's "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde", with Martine Beswick. That, too, is beyond good.