The following is from Charles Ham's 1886 classic Mind and Hand and is offered as a reflection on yesterday's post:

It is through the muscular sense that the hand influences the brain. According to Sir Charles (Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanisms and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design, Harper and Bros. 1864) the hand acts first. It telegraphs, for example, that it is ready to grasp the chisel or the sledge-hammer, or seize the pen, where-upon the brain telegraphs back precise directions as to the work to be done. These messages to and fro are lightning-like flashes of intelligence, which blend or fuse all the powers of the man both mental and physical, and inform and inspire the mass with vital force.

Through constant use the muscular sense is sharpened to a marvelous degree of fineness, and the hand, permeated by it, forms habits which react powerfully upon the mind. If now, during the period of childhood and youth, the hand is exercised in the useful and beautiful arts, its muscular sense will be developed normally, or in the direction of rectitude and the reflex effect of this growth upon the mind will be beneficent.

Also in support of yesterday's post is this from Dr. Henry Maudsley Body and Mind, 1883:

Those who would degrade the body, in order, so they imagine, to exalt the mind, should consider more deeply than they do the importance of our muscular expressions of feeling. The manifold shades and kinds of expression which the lips present--their gibes, gambols, and flashes of merriment; the quick language of a quivering nostril; the varied waves and ripples of beautiful emotion which play on the human countenance, with spasms of passion that disfigure it--all which we take such pains to embody in art--are simply effects of muscular action. ...Fix the countenance in the pattern of a particular emotion--in a look of anger, of wonder, or of scorn--and the emotion whose appearance is thus initiated will not fail to be aroused. And if we try, while the features are fixed in the expression of one passion, to call up in the mind a quite different one, we shall find it impossible to so. ...We perceive, then, that the muscles are not alone the machinery by which the mind acts upon the world, but that their actions are essential elements in our mental operations.