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Eschewing the conventional description of the world as a ‘vale of tears’, Keats protests that it be called rather ‘the vale of soul-making’ (, Letters, p. 249). He had earlier distinguished between those who are able genuinely to explore the further chambers, the inner recesses and dark passages, of what he had called the ‘large Mansion of Many Apartments’ - human life (the life of the mind), and those who stopped thinking or at least did not ‘think into the human heart’ (, Letters, pp. 95-96). The Soul-making, emphasis in the experience of life, lies in the capacity to tolerate the perception that ‘the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’ (Letters, p. 95), that knowledge being co-terminous with the realisation that it is in apprehending that very reality that the many doors open from the Chamber of Maiden Thought.
The human being's development - the progress from one chamber to another - from the first infant or thoughtless Chamber into the Chamber of Maiden Thought, with its ‘intoxicating light and pleasant wonders’, and beyond - that progress depends on the essentially mysterious process of what Keats describes as ‘the awakening of the thinking principle within us’. The system of Soul-making is Keats's description of the growth of the mind. For us children of the vale, the world of pains and troubles ‘schools’ our intelligence, if we allow it to. The learning takes place in a distinctive way. For the vale is the place where the heart must feel and suffer - the Heart is the Mind's Bible; the Mind's experience - ‘it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity…’ (, Letters, p. 250). Here, in the vale, Man is formed by Circumstances, says Keats, ‘touchstones of his heart’, ‘proovings of his heart’, ‘fortifiers or alterers of his nature’. Identity is made, then, through the medium of the Heart in a world of Circumstances (Letters, p. 251). The process Keats describes is the essence of what Bion was later to call