“Appelez le monde, si vous voulez, « la vallée où se forment les âmes »; alors vous découvrirez l'utilité de ce monde.”Correspondance
Lettre à George and Georgiana Keats (avril 1819 )
"Appelez le monde, si vous voulez, « la vallée où se forment les âmes » ; alors vous découvrirez l'utilité de ce monde. (Notez que je parle de la nature humaine dans les termes les plus élevès, la supposant immortelle, ce que je tiens ici pour admis, afin de mieux vous montrer une idée qui m'a frappé à son sujet). J'ai dit : où se forment les âmes, - en distinguant l'âme de l'intelligence."
La lettre complète en anglais :
"'The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken into Heaven- What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please 'The Vale of Soul- making. Then you will find out the use of the world'
'I say 'soul making' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence- There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions- but they are not souls until they acquire identities, till each one is personality itself'
'I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion- or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation'
'I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook'.
'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways'
'As various as the lives of men are- so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence'"