Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson’s line lands like a moral scalpel: no one gets to be pure. Coming from the author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, it reads less like a comforting humanist shrug than a rebuke to Victorian England’s obsession with respectable surfaces. “Commingled” is the key word. It isn’t a tidy balance sheet of virtues and sins; it’s a chemical mixture you can’t separate without destroying the whole. Stevenson rejects the fantasy that goodness is an identity and evil a removable stain.

The intent is quietly radical. By insisting on mixture, he undercuts the period’s punitive moral taxonomy: the fallen woman, the criminal class, the gentleman whose public life is presumed clean. The subtext is that social order depends on pretending the mix doesn’t exist. If everyone is blended, then scandal isn’t an aberration; it’s the system briefly revealing itself. That’s why the phrase feels like a diagnosis of hypocrisy, not a sermon about compassion.

It also functions as a warning against self-deception. Stevenson’s characters - and his culture - try to outsource their darkness: into nightlife, colonial peripheries, secret vices, separate neighborhoods. “Commingled” says the boundary is internal, not geographic. The line works because it’s morally unsentimental: it doesn’t flatter us with innocence or damn us with depravity. It makes the unsettling claim that ethical life begins only after you abandon the comfort of clean categories, and that the most dangerous evil is the kind that believes it isn’t part of the blend.