Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/79

 the body, although he can feel it beating on his left; that courage resides in the gall, the affections in the liver, the direction of bodily movement in the lungs, temper in the stomach, and mental force and wisdom in the kidneys. It is true that even we in the West appear to sanction this confusion of ideas by speaking of a coward as white-livered, and of a fastidious or haughty person as a man of delicate or proud stomach. But what are popular and figurative expressions with us are scientific axioms among the Chinese, and it will take a long term of educational courses before their eyes are opened to the untenable nature of their theories. At the same time, we must not forget that the action and reaction of the mind upon the body and the body on the mind is still a matter of much mystery even to Western thinkers, and the fact that deaths have actually occurred from the influence of imagination solely ought to make us lenient in dealing with the quaint confusions between mind and matter which exist in the Chinese intellect.