He sums up everything of his passions and life in the following passage.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape; Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.
Although the wicked is described in the novel through the beauty of Dorian Gray, it is punished in the end. And it is this punishment of excessiveness that makes the book moralistic. The way the reader is introduced to sins and shame is particular in The Picture of Dorian Gray, since Wilde has made use of the aesthetic element to be the symbol of the immorality, which Victorian critics could not stand. It was thought at the time, quite naively, that only the elderly and the plain could be malicious, a fact which Wilde dismisses. The girl Dorian spared in the country believed that the wicked is associated only with ugliness.
