And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in.
For of the Soul the Body form doth take:
For Soul is form, and doth the Body make.”
And in our own day, Charles Kingsley says, in serious sportiveness: “The one true doctrine of this wonderful fairy tale is, that your soul makes your body, just as a snail makes its shell.” And again: “You must know and believe that people’s souls make their bodies just as a snail makes its shell.... I am not joking, my little man; I am in serious, solemn earnest.”—(“The Water Babies,” Chaps. III. and IV.)
And Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“Aurora Leigh,” Book III.)—
“... the soul
Which grows within a child makes the child grow.”
The physiologists and psychologists, as is not unusual, tardily follow in the wake of the poets. At the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, London, 1892, “Professor Delbœuf said that at all times the mind of man had been capable of influencing the body, but it was only in recent times that this action had been scientifically put in evidence.”—(Times, August 3rd, 1892.)