or painting.

Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it
was yet spring. The pulse and passion of youth were in him,
but he was becoming self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him.
With his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to
wonder at. It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end.
He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play,
whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense
of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.

Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! There was
animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could
say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?
How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists!
And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools!
Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body
really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit
from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a
mystery also.

He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute
a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us.
As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to
their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning,
had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character,
had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed
us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience.