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Call the world if you please “the vale of Soul-making” … How are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? … I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion—or rather it is a system of spirit-creation— … Why may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension by introducing Mediators and Personages in the same manner as in the heathen mythology abstractions are personified—Seriously I think it probable that this System of Soul-making may have been the parent of all the more palpable and personal schemes of redemption.
The concreteness of psychic reality has always been dominant and explicit in the poetic consciousness. Shakespeare gave to airy nothing a “local habitation and a name”, and Milton's Satan announced that the mind was neither Heaven nor Hell, but “its own place”. It is not a place that can be shaped or finished by the conscious will; it cannot—as Satan found—make heaven out of hell; rather, it is