It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the naked eye, we would clearly see the strange phenomenon whereby every individual member of the human race corresponds to one of the species of the animal kingdom; and we would easily recognise this truth, scarcely entertained by the theorists, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pug to the tiger all animals are in man and each of them is in a man – sometimes even several of them simultaneously.
Animals are nothing more than the forms our virtues and our vices take, trotting around before our very eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God reveals them to us to give us pause for thought. Only, since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them educable in the complete sense of the word. What would be the pont? On the contrary, our souls being what is real and having a purpose unique to themselves, God has endowed them with intelligence, that is, the possibility of being educated. Public education, when it is good, can always bring out the latent usefulness of a soul, no matter what it is like to start with.
From Chapter Five of Book Five, ‘The Descent’, from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
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One Comment
I really like the way you allow for her character to come through