All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

Robert Louis Stevenson repeatedly returned to the idea that character is mixed rather than purely virtuous or purely wicked—a preoccupation that also underlies his fiction of divided selves. This sentence is from his essay “Pulvis et Umbra” (“Dust and Shadow”), first published in 1888, where he reflects on human life, moral judgment, and the limits of seeing others clearly. In that essay Stevenson argues against simplistic moral categorizing: in ordinary social encounter we meet people as composites, with virtues and vices intertwined, and our judgments are therefore partial and often unfairly absolute.

Stevenson’s claim resists moral absolutism. To “meet” people is to encounter them in the everyday, where motives are opaque and behavior is inconsistent; what we actually observe is a blend of admirable and blameworthy tendencies. The phrase “commingled out of good and evil” suggests that moral qualities are not separable ingredients but interpenetrating elements of personality. The line encourages humility in judgment and sympathy in interpretation: if everyone is mixed, then condemnation and idealization are both distortions. It also anticipates modern psychological views of character as situational and internally conflicted rather than fixed and unitary.