Faith & Spirit Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence needles the cozy modern fantasy that a person is a single, stable self. The line opens like a field note from an amused naturalist - "a most curious creature" - shrinking Homo sapiens to something observed, not celebrated. That cool distance is the trick: it lets him puncture the Victorian-Christian idea of One Soul as a neat moral ledger. The punchline lands in the blunt arithmetic of "dozens", a deliberately unpoetic number that makes multiplicity feel not mystical but inconveniently real.

The intent is less metaphysical than insurgent. Lawrence spent his career pushing against industrial modernity's demand for legible, disciplined identities: the good worker, the proper spouse, the reasonable citizen. By insisting on "dozens" of souls, he smuggles in his larger argument that the self is not governed by a single rational captain. Desire, instinct, bodily knowledge, social masks, private longings - these are rival claimants, each with its own weather. The subtext dares you to stop treating inner contradiction as a moral failure and start seeing it as the baseline condition.

Placed in Lawrence's early 20th-century moment, the line also reads as an anti-Freudian flex and a companion piece to it: yes, there are layers, but not a tidy map with a therapist as cartographer. Lawrence prefers a swarm. The wit is in the deflation: you think you've got a soul; you've got a crowd.